This Mortal Coil by xparrot, commentary by danceswithgary

[danceswithgary]

Title: This Mortal Coil
Author: xparrot
Commentator: danceswithgary
Rating: PG
Fandom: Smallville



He was in India when he heard his name.

People called for Superman every day, every hour, from everywhere, but there were only a few voices he always heard, asleep or awake, listening or not. And only one person left now would call his name, would call for him and not the superhero.

His loneliness is established with the knowledge that only one person knows who he truly is.

He was mostly underwater when over the roar of the flashflood he heard her whisper, "Clark," and that was all it took to focus his hearing eight thousand miles away, to hear the stutter of her heart, the catch of her breath as she gasped his name, so faintly, and then the thump as her body fell to the farmhouse floor.

"Mom!" he cried, but water splashed in his mouth and no one could hear him over the river's rage. Probably no one would have understood anyway; this was an isolated village, so far from anywhere that they hadn't received any warning of the flood, too far for the government to send help in time.

We're presented with a superhero torn between two duties, one immediately present, one distant.

Yet they still had recognized him when he swooped down from the clouds, had shouted for him as they pointed, and the children had whooped, cheering his name even as the brown water swirled around their knees. The bridge, their only route to safe higher ground, had half-fallen, one of its stone supports ripped away by the first torrent, but he had flown under it, put his shoulders to the soaked wood and raised it from the water.

Only a half of them had made it across yet, mostly the children, the older kids carrying their younger brothers and sisters to safety as their parents waited. There were a couple hundred people waiting and the water was creeping steadily higher around them, but the bridge was too narrow for more than a few to cross at a time, and it was slow going, the footing treacherous as waves washed over the sagging planks.

It was night in Kansas; it might as well be night here, with the clouds over the sun and the rain sheeting down. Two weeks before monsoon season, and damn global warming anyhow. He felt the boards on his curved back shaking with their footsteps, knocking against his shoulders with the heavy blows of the cattle's hooves. The cows were lowing fearfully over the thundering river, prodded and urged and forced forward with slaps from their masters' hands. There were men and women still waiting to cross, but the cattle were important; every life is important, and these beasts were the villagers' lives, even as the babies on the other side wailed for their mothers in their brothers' and sisters' arms.

If he moved, if he let this shaky bridge tumble down into the water, then the next torrent rumbling upriver would take those waiting mothers and fathers and no one would stop their children's wails. Another flood was coming, he could feel it in the rush of the water dragging at his cape, and every second counted, every second they waited might be too long.

Floodwater slapped his face, painted his skin with mud as it washed away his tears.

His burden is layered on with each sentence. He can't leave despite knowing the consequence. He's facing Cassandra's vision - alone in the rain.

The Fortress's 'voice,' if it could be called that, was pitched to carry through any sound; he heard it clear as a bell, clear as the night in Kansas eight thousand miles away. "Kal-El," it said, and then fell silent as he told it, moving his mouth without breath, I know. There were no orders he could give it; he had programmed it so, the first thing he had done when he had mastered the AI, when he had still not fully trusted its purpose, when he had not yet been certain that it would serve his chosen mission rather than the role expected of him. He had ensured that it could not interfere in anything outside the Fortress's boundaries; it could warn and advise him, but that was all, and so it went silent now, with nothing it could do.

He has no one / nothing else to fill the void.

Eight thousand miles away, and he had lost his focus, could not listen through the brown water splashing in his ears and eyes and mouth. His mother had not called his name again, had not said anything or he would have heard it. As he would have heard another voice, if anyone had been with her--there was no one; no one would be visiting that late at night, no one would have a chance of coming and finding her until morning. He should have argued with her more, should have made more than vague mentions about her living alone. He had been worried--but not that worried, not when she was his mother, and she had put her hands on her hips and laughed at him and said, "Clark Kent, does the white hair really make me look that old and frail?" and of course he had told her no, because it didn't. She was his mother and she would never look that old, but his father had never looked old either, hadn't been old yet, and still...he should have done more. Had to do more.

He knew this day was coming, but it would always be too soon.

He was looking around frantically, as well as he could through the water and rain, peering with his x-ray vision as the rough boards clattered and jounced against his back with the footsteps. Looking for a tree trunk, a beam, a boulder, anything big enough to wedge under the bridge, he could place it in an indiscernible split second and it would only need to hold for a minute. But nothing that he could see would do.

He hadn't felt like this since the Caribbean tsunami. Rushing from island to island, racing the water as it receded back into the ocean, scooping people from the saltwater waves and bearing them safely to shore even as he knew that for every man or woman or child he saved, another dozen had died in that instant. He had spent a week solid, searching and helping others to search, bringing supplies and assisting with the first painful steps of rebuilding, and then he had flown to his old bed in his mother's house and slept for twenty-four hours. She had made him chicken soup when he woke up, and hadn't asked any of the questions he could see in her eyes, until he told her it was okay.

He has no solution, and he's losing his source of absolution.

Every footstep on the boards above him, every splash of water, was another second passed, another instant too long. Usually the weight of the bridge would have been too little for him to really feel, but he was bowed under it now, hovering in the rising water with his back arched and aching, his hands slipping on the wet wood. A little longer and that would be too long, but there was nothing he could do.

The people of the drowning village were still saying his name, repeating it like a chant, thanking him as each and every one of them was saved. He barely heard them, striving fruitlessly to listen through the water, through eight thousand miles of earth and ocean for the sound of her breath, for her heartbeat. Hearing nothing and not knowing if it was a failure of his senses or if there was nothing to be heard.

They were almost all across now, and his muscles trembled from the inaction, tensed to move, when all his wandering focus returned to the bellow of a steer, to the piercing cry of a child as he lunged to catch his beast's rope. The boy made it, catching the halter, but it was too late. The steer slipped in the mud and tumbled into the river, and the boy, the thick rope wrapped around his bony wrist, was yanked into the water with the animal.

"Mehul!" a woman screamed as the baby in her arms wailed, and the boy's head broke the surface beside the steer's great white one, frothing brown water to gray as they fought the current. Then, coughing and crying out, the river dragged them both under again.

The jouncing of the boards ceased as the last three men bolted across, and panting on the far bank with their families they gasped for him to go.

There are tough decisions even in his current location. Does he abandon three for one?

He moved, plowing through the water, raising a double crest of brown waves as the bridge collapsed into the river behind him. He was faster than any water could flow, and reached the steer first, still bellowing and kicking even as its lungs filled; and then the boy, hanging limp from the beast's rope. He heaved them both from the river, one arm around the steer's big chest and the other around the boy, flying them up into the pouring rain. To his heartbroken relief, the boy coughed and shivered against him.

When he landed them on the riverbank, the steer struggled to its feet, and the boy tried to stand but folded instead, would have fallen had his mother not been there, sweeping him into her arms, as he choked up more river water. "Mehul," she cried, "Mehul," as he sobbed, "Mata," and buried his face against her chest, shaking. When she looked up, she was crying, too, as she said, "Dhanya-waadh," thanking him. They all were crying thanks to him.

He was already in the sky, a blue falling star shooting through the rain clouds as the people waved and screamed his name, and then with the rolling percussive thud of a sonic boom he was gone.

Eight thousand miles crossed in less than a minute, and he didn't take time to open the door, went through the front window instead, smashing the frame and scattering glass on the stairwell rug. It had been thirty-eight minutes since he had heard his mother call for him, and he felt like he had counted out every second, every second too long. "Mom, I'm here!"

Thirty-eight minutes, and the farmhouse was quiet. There were no heartbeats, no one breathing. "Mom!"

Thirty-eight minutes of self-doubt and torture.

He flew to the kitchen like an arrow, the kitchen where he had heard her fall to the hardwood floor, not wanting to see, having to see.

The kitchen was empty. The teapot was sitting on the stove but the burner had been turned off, and the lights were off, and his mother's body was gone.

"Mom!" He searched the entire house in thirty seconds, doors crashing aside in his wake, knocking over knick-knacks, barely catching her second-favorite vase in time before it shattered. No one was there.

Krypto was barking outside, scratching at the kitchen screen door. He opened the door and the dog rushed in, snuffled at the floor by the stove and then looked up at him, whining anxiously with his tail wagging.

His mother's cell phone was on the coffee table in the living room. Too far away for her to have reached it, and no one had been with her when she fell. The front door was closed but not locked. Smallville was still Smallville; she never locked the door.

He was tracking mud on the living room carpet and his mother was gone.

His inability to focus over the distance only adds to the devastation when he can't find her. Would it have been better for him to hear everything that happened, her final breath, her last heartbeat?

Krypto whined again and nosed his hand. He flew them both back to Metropolis, opened his apartment window and pushed the dog in first. It was three in the morning and no one saw him on the balcony. He stood in his dark living room, not needing any light to see and not having anything to see anyway.

He felt like there was kryptonite in the room, though there was no green glow in the darkness. His stomach hurt and he could hear the mud flaking off him, what had survived his meteoric dive through the atmosphere back to Kansas, gray-brown dust caught in the folds of his cape and the cuffs and collar of his uniform, gritty when he moved, shifting softly to the floor.

The visual of him standing there in the darkness, directionless, his light extinguished.

Sometime later he heard his cell phone ringing in his bedroom, the toneless trill of a stranger's call, cut off as the voicemail picked it up. A moment after that, the Fortress chimed for his ears, "Kal-El, you have a voice message. It is from Metropolis General Hospital. It is about your mother."

He was gone before the Fortress finished speaking, without taking time to grab his phone.

Over Metropolis General, he hovered just out of the way of the helipad, and listened. An unfamiliar female voice said, "Mrs. Kent's condition is stable. She's resting now--"

He's unable to transform himself back into Clark to enter the hospital by human means - he responds instinctively, as-is.

He triangulated from the sound and dove, melted the window lock and slid it open. His mother lay on the bed inside the room, surrounded by machines chorusing in different beeps which he didn't need to listen to her pulse, slow and steady. Her eyes were closed and her face was pale but not waxen. She was asleep. She was alive.

"Mom," he said, and carefully, as carefully as he ever touched a human being, with all their fragile life, he brushed her white-streaked hair away to cup her cheek. Her skin was warm.

He needs that touch to ground himself.

Outside the hospital room door, he heard the unknown woman say, "The sedatives will wear off soon; with luck she'll wake up naturally this morning."

Then a voice that was not unknown said, "Can I see her?"

The doctor said, "It's not policy, but under the circumstances..."

Any circumstances wouldn't matter, he knew that, because he knew that voice, and he knew he should go, too, but he couldn't move from his mother's side. And then it was too late, because the door opened and Lex Luthor walked in.

He was dressed in Armani, fifteen hundred dollars of white, pressed, perfect confidence. He stopped when he entered, made sure the door was shut behind him before the doctor could see inside, and then he turned back and said, "Superman."

Superman can't leave, even knowing the risk. But, is it a risk if Lex is already concealing his presence?

Lex said it the way he always said it. The last time had been a week ago, in his penthouse office standing by the window overlooking the city, swirling brandy in a snifter while he pointed out that there was no connection between him and the bioterrorist organization in question, not that any police or Homeland Security investigation had uncovered, and would he please so inform Ms Lane the next time he rescued her, before LexCorp was forced to file a libel suit against the Daily Planet.

"You can't get to them all before someone talks," Superman had said, and Lex had raised an eyebrow and remarked, "Ah, so do bullets bounce off all terrorists, Superman?" and he had said it then like he said it now, cold and calm and with that smile that never reached his eyes. Like for all his hatred he couldn't be bothered with rage. Like he had said it from the day Superman had first appeared in Metropolis's skies.

Like he always said it, but they had never been standing over his mother's hospital bed before, and Clark, who had almost gotten used to their conversations now, had almost learned how to handle the coldness in Lex Luthor's eyes, just as he had once long ago almost learned how to handle another look there entirely, had no idea what to say. He said nothing.

Clark has no context for this confrontation. Silence is a mature, measured choice.

And Lex said nothing in return, not looking at him, but at his mother asleep on the bed.

His mother slept on, quietly, surrounded by the machines, until finally something rose in Clark, an instinct from ten years as a reporter in his other life, bubbling up and out, "What--"

And Clark breaks first, but still calmly.

Lex answered like he too was speaking from another life, tired like he never was, weighed down and weakened by a long sleepless night. "Stroke," he said, "a mild one, but still. It was close. But the medical chopper made it in time and the doctors don't think there'll be any permanent damage. She's on track for a full recovery and she'll make it." The certainty in his voice was not to be contradicted, but that could be from any life; Lex had always spoken like that. Ready and able to take control of the universe when required.

A callback to the Lex of Smallville, competent, knowledgeable, in charge.

"Who called the hospital?" Clark asked, though he already knew.

"I did," Lex said, with perfect calm, though it was a different calm, a new calm distinct from his cool businessman's composure.

"Why?" Lex looked at him and Clark told him, "You know I have to ask."

Lex shook his head. "No," he said, "you don't. Or you shouldn't have to. But I guess it's not enough. It never was, was it, Clark?" and his tone might be new but the bitterness was old, older than Superman.

But Lex had never called him by name before, not when he was in costume. He glanced down at himself to be sure, but he wasn't wearing his glasses, and the mud streaking his suit didn't hide the bright blues and reds and yellows.

The collision of Clark's two worlds - Clark double-checking himself because he can't keep them separate in his own mind after what's happened.

When he raised his head, Lex was frowning at him. "Clark?" he said, and he was still trying for calm, but something broke through that was older even than the bitterness. He had strode around the bed, was reaching for Clark's arm, and Clark stumbled as if Lex had shoved him. As if Lex were wearing kryptonite, though the ring was absent from his finger tonight. Lex's face was close to his, unreadable, and Lex's naked hand was warm on his arm, and Clark swayed, not sure if he was leaning away from that unasked-for warmth or towards it.

Lex doesn't miss a thing. He never has.

There were dark patches under Lex's eyes and his forehead was creased in two lines between his light brows. He pushed, and while a locomotive at full speed couldn't budge Superman, Clark staggered back, falling into the plastic chair behind him. It rattled as he sat, quivered but didn't break.

Clark is weak, but Superman can never be. Clark is in the hospital room - it doesn't matter what he's wearing.

He was the reporter, but Lex was the one to ask this time, "Where were you?" as he absently brushed mud from Clark's shoulder.

"Somewhere in India. There was a flood."

"Hmm. I thought it was early for monsoons."

"It is."

"Damn global warming. Did you save everyone?"

Clark nodded.

"I was wondering when you didn't turn up right away. She called for you. I thought you might be off-planet."

He wasn't sure if he heard accusation in his voice or not, didn't want to look at Lex's face again to find out. "I heard," Clark said. "I wanted to come. I couldn't."

Clark would hear an accusation, even if only in his own voice.

His mother would understand, without even asking. But his mother was asleep, pale in her hospital bed, and he didn't know if he wanted Lex to understand.

There was only one question of the five basics left, and Lex asked it. "When did you last sleep?"

"I don't know." Clark shook his head. "I don't need to sleep anymore."

No need to sleep only underscores Clark's alien nature.

Lex stood beside his chair and didn't move. After a while, Lex said, "I didn't do it for you, Clark."

Why does Lex point that out? Is he granting Clark an out, no need to thank him?

Clark cleared his throat, not looking up. "How did you hear her?"

"I have the farmhouse wired. Video and audio, infrared, too."

Clark had experience with wires, knew what to look for, what to listen for. The taps must be lead-shielded, at different frequencies than what he was used to detecting. "For how long?"

"Since Superman," Lex said, not quite like he usually said it. Or maybe that was how he usually said it when he wasn't calling Clark by it. "That was first, along with the Daily Planet. It took a little longer to get into your apartment, and Lane's and Olsen's."

"Everywhere?"

"Almost."

The information so casually offered. Of course, Lex was monitoring him.

No, the Fortress would never allow it. He had found some of those bugs before, though he had never been certain of their provenance. Some, but not all, and if he collected every one of them today there would be new ones, better hidden, tomorrow. He should be angry, but his mother was alive. Even if he hadn't been there. "They're not for this, though," and he nodded at the hospital room.

Lex snorted, some familiar tone returning. "Of course not. I need to know. Where you are, what you know. It'd be hard to get anything done otherwise."

He knew what some of those things Lex got done were. Enough. More than enough. It just didn't matter tonight. "Thank you."

Lex's voice rose, angry, when he should have been calm like always. "I told you, I didn't do it for you."

That touched a nerve. It's apparent that Lex didn't want to be thanked by his enemy, for showing a hint of weakness.

"I don't care."

Lex's hand was on his shoulder, no longer brushing at the mud, his grip tightening. If Clark concentrated, he could barely feel those long fingers trying to dig into his unyielding muscle. "I didn't do it for her, either," Lex said, the edges of his voice ragged. "There have been people before, women before, who might've cared about me once. I've let them die. If it suited me."

Lex is really uncomfortable with what's happened, with his own actions. His script has been abandoned.

It might have been true or it might not have been. It didn't matter now anyway. He had let people die, too, even if it had never suited him.

"Do you know how important she is?" Lex's voice was hardly above a whisper. "How important they all are--but she's one of the most important. The only one who calls you by name, even when you're in that get-up. Maybe she's all that holds you here. Who can let you make believe you're really human. Once she's gone, what's Clark Kent but your mask? Just something you put on to fool people. Give you a break between saving the world, and otherwise there's only the alien left. And when the alien finally comes to need no more time off--what's left to preserve us weak mortals from his power? When will we have a chance to be human, to hate and fear and make mistakes, with Superman's shadow always over us?"

Lex has thought this all through, probably during long, sleepless nights.

"You said you didn't do it for me," Clark said.

"I lied." Lex's laugh was brittle. "You should know by now, Clark, I always lie."

"I know," Clark said. "You were lying just now. Mom's not the only one--not the only one who calls me by name. Not the only one who could hold me here, and you know it."

As tired as Clark is, he's not missing what's happened, what Lex is revealing.

"Do I?" Lex said, but strained when it was supposed to be sarcastic, strained like he hadn't heard for years, and Clark wasn't the only one sleepless tonight, not the only one exhausted and drained and tired, so tired of all of this. Tired because he was human, even if he didn't need to sleep anymore and could cross eight thousand miles in the blink of an eye; his mother was human, and he was her son, and always would be, as he always was his father's son, even so many years after the funeral.

But Lex maybe wouldn't believe that. And Lex didn't have to. "Yes," Clark said, "you do," and he stood, and slid his hands around the smooth curve of Lex's scalp like he always wanted to do, and kissed him. And Lex sighed against his mouth, and tightened his hands around Clark's shoulders, and held on, for all the mud getting smeared on his expensive suit, for all the strength that could break his fragile mortal human body with a snap; held on like he would never let go.

Two tired giants leaning on each other. They would fall, would fail, if left alone. Fortunately, they have each other. They always did.

fin