Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Man Or Monster? 5/7

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Chapter 5: In The Mirror, Darkly
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Despite having been waiting for it, Clark--*Superman*, he reminded himself--started at the shrill ring of the phone slicing through the funereal silence of his--*Clark’s*--apartment. He’d had a moment of heart-stopping fear when Lois had slipped out of the alley beneath the noses of the men Luthor had left behind, but she had gotten away, surviving and thriving in situations that would have been impossible for anyone else, as dedicated and intent as always. She had told him it would take her twenty minutes or so to find a payphone far enough away from his apartment to allay suspicion, but Superman hadn’t noticed the passing of time at all, too busy staring at the pictures and tokens and souvenirs and belongings that didn’t fit at all with the Suit he now wore.

Earlier--hours or days, he wasn’t quite sure anymore--he’d lamented the circular wanderings of his own thoughts, had thought himself caught in some form of demented cyclone that ripped him from solid ground to spin him wildly. But now his thoughts weren’t going in circles at all; now they were set in straight lines that never wavered no matter how he searched frantically for some way to veer from the fate opening up before him. Clark Kent--ordinary man underneath the Suit--made things complicated and difficult and…and beautiful. But Superman? Well, with Superman, there was only a single course of action, only one way of life, so little left to him, all simple and uncomplicated.

No parents, not until he waited and scanned the farm for any signs of other people coming closer, and even then only under the cover of darkness.

No friends, not unless he wished to sign their death warrants or signed up to become their 24/7 bodyguard service.

No Lois. Bad enough he’d already singled her out by taking her to the cruise ship--he didn’t fool himself that word wouldn’t eventually get out about that no matter what they made Luthor believe today--but for him to do anything but give her the interviews he’d given her before would be dangerous in the extreme. There would be no partnering up on investigations, no desks side by side in a newsroom, no lunches taken together, no late night stakeouts, and the Daily Planet hadn’t been gone so long that a life absent of those things seemed normal.

But worse, worse than anything else, there would be no hope. No hope of romance in the future, of soft looks and shy touches and wondrous kisses. No hope of more friends or Kerth awards or casual relationships formed with coworkers or people he interviewed or neighbors in an apartment complex.

There would only be victims, and the rescued, and emergency workers, and the press--not individual press members, just the press as a whole, a faceless mass of professional inquiries and dispassionate questions.

Nothing at all compared to what Clark Kent had to offer, and he could no longer pretend to himself that he would one day view this death as a good thing--or at least, not a bad thing--so while he’d waited for Lois to call him, while he’d watched the men outside hastily call their boss to tell him Superman had arrived at Clark Kent’s apartment, he’d tried to find a way to bring back the reporter, the friend, the son, the *man*.

Perhaps he could say Superman had arrived earlier than the snoops outside thought. Perhaps he could claim that Kryptonite was useless against him and that he’d cauterized Clark’s wound. Only, his scar was growing smaller and smaller, rubbed away by the constant touches he brushed across it, and soon there would be no evidence of a wound that would have either killed a human man or left him weak and sick for months. Perhaps he could say they had staged it all, a trap to prove Luthor’s criminal dealings, but then how would they explain away the testimony of Luthor and his two thugs? Even should Luthor not tell anyone, *he* would surely figure it out, and jailed or not, Superman was under no delusions that Luthor wouldn’t still have some influence among the criminal underworld outside the prison.

If he were only smarter, Superman thought, or faster, or *better*, then he wouldn’t even *be* in this situation. He’d have known to keep Clark unassuming and unremarkable. He would have realized that Luthor was following them absolutely everywhere. He would have taken Luthor’s obsession of Lois more seriously and realized that the billionaire wasn’t averse to striking out jealously, possessively, at whatever threatened what he saw as her place at his side. He would have pretended to fear and belief in Luthor’s lies. He would have…he would have done *anything*, just so long as Clark Kent wasn’t gone forever.

But the ring of the phone, the sight of the men listening in outside his apartment, the feel of the Suit chafing against the burning fist in his stomach and the ache in his limbs, the emptiness of Clark’s apartment despite the fact that he was standing within it--the bloodstains on the floor that he’d have to find a way to clean if he didn’t want the police wondering why Clark Kent had alien blood--all of it was enough to drive home the reality he hadn’t been able to avoid.

“Hello?” he said into the phone, barely remembering in time to speak in Superman’s deeper register.

“Clark?” Lois asked, and for a brief instant--before he remembered that there was no secret identity anymore--he froze in horrified disbelief that she would give him away like that. “Clark, I hope you’re happy! That source you sent me after last night never even showed up.”

Superman’s lips curved up slightly in admiration at the deft way she’d misdirected any eavesdroppers. “Lois, this is Superman,” he interrupted softly, gently. This was a performance, no question of that, and like the most accomplished of thespians, he had to play this perfectly. No tremor in his voice, no sign of weakness, nothing to give away the fact that he was powerless and still hurting from his run-in with Kryptonite. If he could end this day having convinced Luthor that he was still invulnerable, it wouldn’t be a complete loss.

“Superman?” Lois was a master performer herself, the slightest tinge of dread mixed with palpable surprise and swirled all together with that adoration she’d held for Superman before The Window. “What’s going on? Where’s Clark?”

Oxygen, cold and clean and clear, flowed through his lungs, pulled in, *dragged* in as he sought the courage needed to say the words he’d never wanted to say, the truth he’d been fleeing every time he left a country after an observed rescue. He wanted to drop the phone, or hang it up, or better yet, just turn back time so he never told Lois the truth, never told her that he loved her. Or back even further. Wouldn’t it be better, after all, if he’d never met her? Never come to Metropolis, never fallen in love with a woman he’d lied to, a woman who hated him and thought him equal to a monster. Thought him to *be* a monster.

But he couldn’t make himself believe that any more than he could make himself believe that Superman was better than Clark Kent.

Luckily, he had pictures of his parents scattered all across his apartment. They smiled at him from a dozen different angles, and in their faces he saw pride and love and affection and so much sacrifice, all of it made for him. And what kind of son would he be if he ignored their mortality just so he could keep a name?

So he took another breath and imbued his voice with all the confidence of Superman--a man who needed no job, who had no friends, who flew away and disappeared once the crisis was over.

“Clark’s dead,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lois. I tried to save him, but it was too late. He’s gone.”

“No!” The denial was so immediate, so broken, so disbelieving that for a minute Superman seriously wondered if he’d hallucinated Lois being in on the Secret. But her perfume still danced in the air and the coffee still sat, cold and untouched, on the counter, and she had always been a good actress, able to twist him around her little finger at her slightest whim.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and he was. He was sorry he’d misled her into thinking that he could ever be an ordinary man, sorry he’d tried to be a faultless hero for her, sorry that he’d lost both of those things in one night. Sorry that he’d lost *her*.

But there was no point in standing here and feeling sorry for himself. Luthor was still free, no doubt congratulating himself on his murder of Clark Kent, perhaps trying to decide just how weak Superman was thanks to the Kryptonite, and dangerous as ever. Still out there, considered a heroic patron by the city of Metropolis, touted as a philanthropist among the leading men of the eastern seaboard--he was still a hero, still had his alter ego, while Clark Kent lay dead and buried already and Superman was alone in the world.

It wasn’t fair, and that sea of anger, that terrible rage that felt so alien--felt so *empowering*--still surged and roiled within him, howling with tempestuous currents at the reminder that Luthor still possessed everything he’d just ripped away from Clark--no, from *Superman*.

For months, he had played Luthor’s game, scared away by threats to Metropolis’s citizens, to the secret he kept, and he’d gotten nowhere. He’d watched as Luthor gained more ground, secured more and more of Metropolis, insinuated himself at Lois’s side, taken away the people that had accepted Clark as one of their own, a reporter known for his own skills rather than the abilities conferred by a sun alien to his own. He’d known Luthor’s game from the beginning, but all he’d done was lose ground. So no more playing that game. No more playing at all. It was time to do something.

Dimly, he was aware that he was becoming just as impetuous as Superman ever was--as Clark Kent had never been--and it made sense, because he *was* Superman and he didn’t have reasons--two capital letters that weren’t frightening, that were turned into an affectionate nickname by Jimmy--to be calm and methodical anymore.

The clock was racing, time sheering past him at a furious rate. Luthor knew Superman had arrived at Clark Kent’s apartment. He had confirmation that Clark Kent was dead. He now knew where Lois was and that she hadn’t--supposedly--been at Clark Kent’s apartment. Now, he would rid himself of the only obstacle remaining between him and the object of his obsessive affections.

He would come for Superman.

Superman had bought himself time by sounding strong over the phone--he had no doubt that would throw Luthor as the billionaire debated whether the Kryptonite had worked or not--but in order to make that deception count, he had to move quickly.

“I’m sorry,” he told Lois for the hundredth time. It seemed he was always apologizing to her, but this time, his apology wasn’t for the past. Clark Kent had hurt her, over and over again, but Superman still had a chance of obtaining her forgiveness, and even if that was as impossible as it seemed, he could still protect her.

So he hung up the phone. There was nothing more to say, no reason to stand there and eulogize Clark when they both knew how badly Clark had failed, when the apartment he stood in and the parents he’d left behind were eulogy enough. Maybe one day, years from now, he’d be able to tell the world what Clark Kent had contributed to Superman. Maybe one day he’d be able to publicly acknowledge his parents and let the whole world know just how much they’d done for him. Maybe one day he’d be able to thank Lois for the idea she’d given him, the ideals she’d set before him, the hero she’d helped him be.

One day. But not today.

Today was for Superman. A Superman who was hurt and raw and bereft. And powerless. A Superman who would have to rely on the tenuous strength of his symbol and his cape, his colors and his reputation, his voice and his stance, to convince his most dangerous foe that he was invulnerable, even though now as always, he was the very opposite. Today, he would make Luthor regret the only capitalized word that mattered anymore, the only name he had left to him.

Superman didn’t have to make plans. He was invulnerable, unstoppable, hemmed in only by the moral code he set himself, the polite courtesy he showed to the laws of a planet not his own. He could afford to be reckless because nothing could touch him. He could confront Luthor where Clark Kent hadn’t been able to because Superman was alone. Isolated. Set apart. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain and if his life was lost in the attempt, it would only serve to prove to the world Luthor’s corruption and evilness and make of Superman a martyr that might inspire the world even more than he did as a living beacon.

But without his powers, Superman had only the virtue of surprise on his side. It wasn’t hard, then, to know what he had to do. Bait, Luthor had called him, so he would bite because Clark was dead--and that was the fate that always claimed bait, wasn’t it?--and Superman was the fish. Once the bait was taken, there was only one course for the fish to take--to fight or die.

Resolve turned his rage to slick, black ice, coursing like steel chips through veins, crystalline sharp but coldly numbing, dulling his vibrant pain from blaring colors to quiet grays.

When he opened his--*Clark’s*--front door, stepped across the threshold, red boots vibrant--*alien*--against the mundane landing, he felt as if he’d stepped into a new world. Funny, he supposed, that the newspapers and the governments and the public had thought it a new world when Superman had first entered the picture, but he only felt it now when Clark Kent exited the scene. Perhaps this was what birth felt like, messy and terrifying and shockingly daunting. Perhaps this shooting pain in his chest was only the pain of labor and would soon pass.

He hoped it…but he didn’t believe it.

Luthor’s men watched him come with neutrality that melted into shocked disbelief before turning into cracked aloofness. The phone the driver was holding fell to his knee as his hand went slack; Superman imagined he could hear Luthor breathing on the other end of that call, scheming his schemes, plotting his plots, never knowing that no matter how these next few hours turned out, he’d already won.

“Your *boss* wanted to see me,” Superman said in a deep tone, emphasizing the right word even if he didn’t give it the capital. After everything else--the Park Bench, the Window, the Fountain, the Apartment--Luthor didn’t deserve the upper case letter his hidden title usually claimed. He wondered, idly, if even his ‘invulnerable’ system would eventually develop a sore throat from the strain of the lower registers he would have to always speak in now, or if Superman could gradually switch to Clark’s more normal voice now that there was no alter ego to give away.

“You…” The two men glanced at each other before the bolder of the two straightened in the driver’s seat and met Superman’s unblinking stare through the open window. “You got the message?”

“Oh, I got it loud and clear,” he grated, jaw clenched, eyes tight. Black ice *poured* through his nerves system. “And I have one for him in return.” He paused long enough for the two men to look nervous, to shift their weight as if to run, then said, slowly and distinctly, “So take me to him.”

And he opened the back door and slid down into the seat. He had to gather his cape behind him, had to sweep it inside the car and make sure it didn’t get caught in the door when he closed it behind him. An annoyance--trifling, but he suspected the trifling annoyances would keep building and building into an insurmountable wall between him and everyone else the longer he was Superman, the further from Clark and humanity he moved.

And how long would it be before he’d forgotten entirely what it was to be human? How long before he became truly alien?

The two thugs exchanged glances and whispered into the phone and nodded with faked bravery to whatever commands Luthor barked out, and in the end, they started the car and pulled out onto the street. Superman was glad for their silence. He had nothing to guide him through experiences such as these--through any experience save crises--no expertise, no frame of reference, only a river of black ice that sought out his every rational thought and encased it in crystalline snowflakes, simple and cold and stark, but so utterly complicated in design that he couldn’t escape them. The cell-phone he’d hidden in the pocket of his cape made a dent against his back, squeezed between leather and spandex, but Superman scarcely noticed it. An annoyance. He’d catalog them and move on. Life on an alien planet was hard, but it was what it was and that was that.

His plan was simple, really, almost too easy. And it was all but doomed to failure without powers. Without Clark Kent. Without the hope he’d lived with his entire life.

But still. He was Superman now, and being the superhero was all about making the hard decisions. Luthor was insane, evil, and if Superman were gone, he would consider himself the victor, would smirk his smug grin and consider the world as his own personal playground. And Lois? She would be his prize--willingly or not--but after a while, when Luthor began to be bored with his victories, what would he do with her?

Superman’s anger shifted dangerously close to fear, veered away from cold implacability, and he had to stiffen, had to clench his jaw and fold his hands into tight fists. He’d messed up, miscalculated a thousand times over and only made things worse the more he tried to fix them, but that was his fault, not Lois’s, and he couldn’t let her pay. Not for his mistakes. Not for Luthor’s ambition.

No. This had to end. It had to end *now* before anything *worse* could happen. Because…because if Clark Kent could be killed so very easily, then so could Lois Lane, and the world could survive without an ordinary man from Kansas come to make his mark on the world, but it would not so easily survive the loss of a woman with Lois’s passion for life, a reporter with her talent and her skills, a hero who lived every day without powers and still changed the world.

Anger returned, surged and boiled within him, and he relaxed a bit in relief, giving himself over in immolation to that sea of fury.

Superman didn’t expect the thugs to drive him straight to LexTower in broad daylight--in fact, he didn’t expect to visit LexTower at all--but he had, once again, underestimated Luthor’s arrogance. He’d have to start thinking like the crime-lord, he told himself sternly, have to start anticipating him if he was going to defeat him. Clark would have shuddered at that thought and determined to find another way, but Superman didn’t have the luxury. Superman could be ruthless when he had to be--after all, he didn’t have any human empathy to soften him--and sometimes, only cold, quick decisions could save the day.

The thugs drove him into a back entrance to a parking garage beneath LexTower. It was dark, shadowed, cold, and with the cessation of the sunlight, the receding pain in Superman’s abdomen squirmed and wakened and writhed. He took in a sharp intake of air, held it, held it, held it, until the nibbling rat inside calmed itself, became the normal, ordinary and accepted and thus banished to the background, and then he could breathe again, but slowly, steadily, giving nothing away. Superman wasn’t a disguise anymore, so that meant he had to *be* disguised all the time. Constantly concealing, always misdirecting, never admitting to anything.

The car came to a halt--he strained his senses, tried to convince himself he could hear the heartbeats of Luthor’s men without the engine sound muffling it, but he couldn’t quite do it. Superman wasn’t a liar, not even to himself.

He didn’t wait for the two men, just swung the door open and stepped into the shadows of the vast, claustrophobic garage. It was empty, and his boots against the concrete echoed though long, endless expanses of gray and white and yellow. He didn’t know where to go--Luthor was as adept at hiding as the viper he so often emulated--but he refused to show any hesitation. Superman had x-ray vision, supersenses, and a confidence no human could touch. He would know where to go without hesitation, and if he didn’t, he would simply walk through every wall, tear down every floor, crumple whatever obstacles stood in his path until he reached his goal.

If he weren’t suffering from the effects of a Kryptonite blade to his stomach. If he weren’t powerless. If he hadn’t just watched everything he’d ever wanted die in front of him with the strike of a single blade.

If he were truly the Superman the world thought him to be.

He set out toward the elevator. His footsteps were even, loud, steady, everything that Superman was. His face was expressionless, distant and aloof because that was the image Superman cultivated. His cape fluttered at his ankles, his suit the only point of brightness in the otherwise dim surroundings, a beacon and a symbol and a hundred other abstract, empty things that meant so much to the masses but nothing to the individual he now was.

Behind him, the thugs paused and then raced to catch up to him. He’d intentionally chosen a pace that was slow enough they could easily flank him before he reached the elevator--he might be impetuous and impatient, but he didn’t intend on giving away just how lost he was.

The elevator was a nightmare of close confines made closer by the thugs on either side of him, the lights not nearly bright enough to calm his distant panic. He shouldn’t be claustrophobic, he thought, and then realized that it was Superman who was claustrophobic and Clark who had pretended he wasn’t. And yet again, he realized that the wrong identity had survived. Clark could have made a new superhero to save Metropolis from its darker denizens, could have asked his mom to make a new suit with different bright colors, could have based himself in a new city if need be. But it was Clark who was gone, and Superman who was left, and if he thought anymore on it, he’d fall to his knees, crumple and shake and curl in on himself…and Luthor would get away.

So he stayed upright. He watched his reflection in the silver doors and schooled his features until they were a statue’s, grim and chiseled into what they were by the perceptions and wishes of the designers rather than his own stone will.

They were in the elevator for a long time. Minutes ticking by, ticks and tocks he counted silently in his head because it was better to do that than to rage and strike out at the walls and tear through the elevator shaft until there was room to breathe and move and the sunlight could reach him and scare away the creatures clawing at his insides. Long minutes when the only things that moved were his guards’ eyes, darting to him and away, and the red numbers showing the dozens of floors they were passing by far too slowly.

When they finally stopped, it was because they had gone as high as they could--as high as even Superman could until his powers came back--the penthouse suite as opulent and luxurious and over-the-top as both Clark Kent and Superman had noticed on their previous visits. Luthor was standing near the balcony, cigar in his mouth, one hand holding onto it, the other setting a delicate wineglass on a table set with linen and flowers. He turned, though, at the ding of the opening elevator doors and smiled--oh, how he *smiled*--at Superman.

Lex Luthor. He was a god surveying his domain, triumphing over his fallen enemies, a demigod accepting what was his due, a hero to the masses with his money and his charities and his entrepreneurial endeavors. He was the closest thing the world had had to a superhero until Superman came onto the scene, and Clark--*Superman*, he reminded himself viciously; there couldn’t be any slips this close to Luthor--realized now that this could never have gone any other way. They were polar opposites, he and Luthor, so different that no matter the circumstances, no matter how smart Clark was or Superman could be, no matter what he had told Lois or not told her…they still would have ended up here. The same, she had called them, and what did magnets with the same charge do? They repelled each other, fought and grappled and struggled until one or the other was knocked aside.

A monster in the guise of a hero.

An alien in the guise of a man. Or perhaps it was a man in the guise of an alien.

And that was what it all came down to. Here he stood in a richly furnished penthouse--the only home Lex Luthor had, for all his wealth, the top floor of his company’s headquarters--in the suit his mom had made for him in a farmhouse in Kansas, and Luthor was no more a charitable philanthropist than Clark was an aloof alien. They were who they were and pretending otherwise wouldn’t help, wouldn’t save them, wouldn’t keep the world from thinking what it would.

He was Clark Kent, son of two farmers who’d wanted a child more than anything and had taken in a baby boy who’d landed near their home in a spaceship. A reporter looking for a place to make a difference. A man looking for love and a place to belong.

And Luthor was…well, Clark didn’t know *what* he was, a vortex of rage and greed and ambition that would never be satisfied because there’d always be another ladder to climb, another victory to achieve, another enemy to destroy. He’d always strive, always reach for what he thought was his due, and he would never be satisfied, and maybe Lois was right and Clark was more like him than he wanted to admit--reaching and straining and hoping for something that would never ever be his and that he should simply set aside as impossible.

Mirror reflections, face to face, and Clark wondered if this was what it would be like if his own reflection would ever defy him. Wondered if he would stare and gape and think that this, *this*, could not be him, could not be what everyone else saw when they looked at him or interacted with him. He’d felt it, a bit, with the ill-fated clone of his, but that had been different. Perverted. Flawed, because it hadn’t taken any time at all to know that the clone, as much as he might have been a brother, was not Clark Kent at all. He had been only a shadowy, marred reflection of Superman in pond water--no Clark, no apartment, just a closet full of inverted Superman suits.

But Luthor…Luthor was closer, more similar, harder to recognize and harder to deny.

Clark felt feverish. He thought it was the black ice inside him at first, but there was sweat on his brow and his hands were trembling and his stomach was writhing in on itself in open rebellion, and the windows, as well as the open door to the balcony, were all tinted so that there wasn’t enough sunlight. What little could make its way into Luthor’s lair was obstructed and absorbed and devoured by the countless meaningless, priceless items cluttering the penthouse. More than anything at that moment, Clark wished he had his heat-vision so that he could obliterate everything standing between him and sunlight.

He stopped where he was, halfway into the suite, not wanting to give away the unsteadiness of his legs. Why, he wondered, was it so much worse now than it had been? Why wasn’t he getting better? Why didn’t the sunlight sneaking its way to him through the maze of Luthor’s treasures and tools seem to matter at all?

But the answer, the reason, the danger was obvious, and his thoughts must be slowed as much as the sunlight for him not to have realized it earlier. Of course, he thought, chiding himself as if he were both recalcitrant schoolboy and remonstrative teacher. Of course. Lois had warned him, had told him that Luthor would have kept Kryptonite with him, would not have laid it all to rest with Clark Kent’s body.

So here he was, facing the worst of himself, defenseless and powerless, and now weak and ill, and he couldn’t quite remember why he had thought this was a good idea.

“Ah, Superman!” Luthor’s jovial greeting was like fingers down a chalkboard to superhearing activated to its fullest. Clark wanted to flinch away, but Superman was stronger than that. He folded his arms over his chest--hiding the scar that felt too warm, so warm he was afraid it was bleeding out in Luthor’s presence--and stared at Luthor impassively.

Luthor made a gesture, magnanimous, condescending, and his two thugs gratefully peeled off and shut themselves back into the coffin-like elevator. Clark didn’t watch them go, didn’t take his eyes off Luthor himself. There was sludge circling his brain, corralling away all useful thoughts, but the one thing he did know was that the more confident Luthor was, the worse Superman’s standing was, and a bluff was all he had on his side to begin with, so he couldn’t let anything else delay the inevitable confrontation.

“Superman, I have to admit, you surprised me,” Luthor said. He didn’t share Clark’s wariness, or perhaps was simply too arrogant to show it. He turned his back and poured more wine into his glass. He poured one for Clark, too, but at Clark’s flat gaze, he shrugged and set it aside. “I didn’t expect you to come straight to me. Bold--I like that. It makes me regret all over again that we couldn’t come to an arrangement. With my…flair for intelligence, shall we say, and your powers--well, nothing could stop us.”

“We both know you’d never trust me and I’d never obey you,” Clark said sternly. He hoped those were the right words. It was getting increasingly hard to think, and he found himself shaking his head to rid himself of the ache clamping his temples in an iron clasp. It didn’t work, and he belatedly realized it was a stupid move to have made. Now Luthor knew he was affected. Or maybe, he hoped--because even now, after everything, Clark couldn’t completely exorcise himself of hope--Luthor would suspect that Superman was faking to lure him into a false sense of complacency. To bait *him*.

“Yes, well…” Luthor sighed and shook his own head, as if in regret, as if he weren’t watching Clark closely from narrowed eyes as beady as a hawk’s, predatory and merciless. “You sure you won’t have a drink? There’s no reason we can’t be civilized, even if we never will work together.”

A wave of dizziness assailed him as Luthor held out the wineglass toward him. A wineglass with a tint to it, greenish and glowing and all but concealed by the darkness of the red wine within. Green and glowing, and it grew larger and larger as Luthor walked forward. His footfalls were heavy, ponderous and slow and implacable, and Clark wished he could believe that was because his supersenses were back, but he knew better. He knew time was running out, and as if he were still in the elevator, he could feel the fateful *tick* switch to the dreaded *tock*.

His time had run out.

There was a whirl of color and movement, sudden and sharp, and the incongruous sound of glass shattering. Clark was on the floor, his cape wrapped around him like some bizarre form of armor, thicker than cloth, woven with love and belief and hope and a mother’s laughter, a father’s pride, red as the blood they didn’t share, as the blood leaking out against the blue of his suit, sticky and hot next to his ribs, but the cape masked that too, masked it and his secret--The Secret, because if he was giving out capital letters then surely that deserved one too--from Luthor, who was also, it seemed, on the floor.

And the knuckles on Clark’s right hand stung.

He’d hit Luthor. Clark almost laughed at his own audacity--at Superman’s impulsiveness and Clark’s human act--would have laughed except there was glass in a pile of shards between him and Luthor. A line drawn in the sand, emerald and jade and glowing with radioactive fire like shooting stars in his vision. A line he couldn’t cross, but an imperfect one made of dozens of tiny bits, sharp and serrated and able to pierce impenetrable flesh as easily as Lois’s touch.

Shooting stars laid out like flaming constellations, and Luthor stood and strolled among them, stooped and stood again with alien stars in his hand. Clark--Superman--the hybrid in between them both--was defenseless. He was invulnerable, but so very, very fragile. Unbelievably strong, but indescribably frail. Possessing powers no human did, but nothing at all without the human within.

He was a mass of contradictions, and yet…and yet the man striding toward him in a nimbus of green was utterly simple. He was greed wrapped in silk. He was vice hidden beneath charm. He was ambition masked in philanthropy.

He was a monster, sprawling snarls of misguided intentions and misplaced arrogance and mistaken deeds, a singular knot that fouled up everything it touched.

And in the end, there wasn’t anything similar about them at all.

“You’re going to kill me?” Clark asked. His voice shook and wavered; it wasn’t pitched low like Superman’s; it was as thin and wavering as the armor between him and the revelation of his secrets, as the disguise he wore to differentiate between Clark and Superman. But it was there, and it said what he needed to, and it was the bait that hung in front of Luthor.

And Luthor, as greedy and shortsighted as any fish, bit.

“Kill you?” Luthor repeated. He knelt and reached out a hand, long and slender and merciless as he gripped Superman’s hair and raised his head up so he could whisper in his ear. “I killed your reporter friend just because he was in my way. I lured you here because this is *my* city and we can’t have you dividing loyalties. And now, yes, *Super*man, I am going to kill you.” He drew a line down Clark’s face, and it took a long, pain-hazed moment for Clark to realize that it was not his touch that hurt but the edge of the tinted glass he was using to paint blood along his cheekbone, along his wrist, along the exposed line of his neck, acts of war splashed over living surfaces.

“You won’t get away with this,” Superman warned him. He’d always liked to warn his enemies of what was coming, ever since the beginning, when Metropolis was new and Superman had just birthed himself from a thirst for justice and homespun spandex and years of staring at the stars, when Luthor was alien and unknown and this penthouse had been glimpsed only amid rain and lightning and party lies and the silver of a drawn sword at his throat.

Luthor laughed. Laughed out loud as if he were not trailing lines of fire and blood and destruction down Superman’s tensed fingers. “That’s why I have won, and you’re on the floor beneath my feet--because you never realized what it is to be a man of power. You lived it, but you never *understood*. We make the rules--*I* make the rules, and I follow them, and I win, and no one will be there to gainsay me. It’s *my* city, Superman, and you…you will be nothing more than a curious blip in the history of it, while my name will be stamped on every foundation, written on every tower, engraved on every enterprise. There are men and then there are gods, and you have never seen the difference. But now…” He laughed again, and Clark couldn’t hold back the thunder rising inside him, building up from the pit of his stomach, molded in the shape of the vise on his head, exploding out from every gash and rip and tear Luthor made in his flesh, a cry wrung from him, pain given audible form.

“Now,” Luthor said, “it’s over.”

“Yes,” Clark said. “It’s over.”

And the doors burst open, and blue and gold and flesh colors burst into the room, a mass intrusion, the cavalry arrived, and Clark’s eyes were cloaked in green, an aura that touched the whole world, but he knew Henderson was in the lead, a cell-phone in his hand where he’d heard every malicious, incriminating word Luthor had spewed at him. Clark was tangled in his cape, in the blood streaming from multiple rents, but he could feel behind him, against sensitive flesh, the ridges of the phone he’d hidden within his armor.

Luthor was shouting, and Henderson was saying something over him, and there was movement and noise and sensation, but Superman was stuck. Trapped in a cocoon of his own making. Everything hurt. No one was calling for help--they were, but he couldn’t hear them, couldn’t reach them, couldn’t answer them--and there were other heroes on the scene, and there was a tiny, sharp-toothed creature trying to escape from his stomach and join its brethren eating him up from the outside in, and the shards of Kryptonite were only a pace away.

But Clark didn’t care.

All he cared about, all he could think about, was Lois. He didn’t care, anymore, about fountains or windows or benches, didn’t care about identities or crushes or lies. He just wanted to see her, wanted to touch her, wanted…well, it didn’t matter, did it? She hadn’t even come. He was lying on the ground, maybe dying, while Luthor’s true colors were exposed before all, and she hadn’t come.

His eyes slid closed against the blur of motion over by the balcony, the shouts that were as muffled as if he were still floating underwater, cleaning himself from the dirt and silt of a mile-long trench and trying to decide what he should do when he returned to Lois, trying to decide if there was a chance for them, a future where she could be his friend again rather than an enemy. Floating, peaceful, serene before the violence of the storm; he only wished the water was blue rather than that sickly, glowing green.

“Superman! *Superman*! Someone help me!”

He was dreaming again. He sank deeper, closed his eyes more firmly, a child tucked away beneath his blankets, hiding, hiding, *hiding* because the world was too big and noisy and demanding and *disappointing* to face anymore. But this was a good dream. Lois’s voice, shouting for him, worried and concerned. Lois’s warmth permeating his skin, penetrating past the armor of his cape as she knelt next to him. Lois’s fingers gentle on his face, avoiding the slices in his flesh, whispers of coolness and grace painting a masterpiece between the ravages of war Luthor had left. Lois, here, with him, focused on *him* even though it was Luthor’s penthouse and Luthor’s downfall and Luthor’s name that would be on every headline the next morning. Every headline except the Daily Planet’s, because the Daily Planet didn’t have headlines anymore, but that was as painful to contemplate as the green tears in his skin, so he frowned and focused instead on Lois.

There were more hands than hers on him, turning him, straightening him, and they would see the blood on his side, see the scar from where Luthor had stabbed Clark Kent and left him for dead. They would see and his parents would have to flee and he should have known better than to ever think anything would be simple.

But Lois was right there, her fingers working against his side, and suddenly his cape was blanketing him, red blood on red folds, hidden and discreet, and his parents were safe.

“Get a doctor!” she snapped, and the extra hands were gone.

Clark tried to open his eyes. He could lift weights that boggled the minds of anyone who knew the laws of natural science, but making his flimsy eyelids open was beyond him and so he wouldn’t even get a last glimpse of Lois Lane. He tried to reach out, to touch her, to caress her cheek, but his hand no longer obeyed him, and it was easier to stop trying at all than to try and fail over and over and over again. Easier to flee to the darkness and the lake, restful and blue and full of cold sunlight, than to wake to the ruins that were left to him.

“Clark. Clark, please.” A whisper in his ear, a breath against ruptured flesh. But it was *her* voice, and she was saying his name, and that was a miracle. “Clark, don’t leave me. Please, please, don’t leave me. You have to be okay.”

A dream--a good one--but dreams didn’t come true, heroes couldn’t save everyone, and sometimes monsters and good men were the same thing.

“No more Clark,” he breathed out through liquid bubbling in his throat, tickling his lips. “He’s dead.”

“No!” Lois snapped at him. But it wasn’t her usual snap of command. It was fractured with doubt, broken with tears, made ineffectual by regret. “No, Clark! Clark!”

But Clark was dead, and without Clark, Superman was only a blue suit and red cape now stained with so much blood it was too heavy to wear. The apartment was gone and so was the closet, and there was nothing left.

He slipped into an abyss with no end, and all dreams ceased.

***