FIC: DCFic - The Other Side - R - 2/4 - Kon/Tim/Cassie, Clark/Lex
Clark still hadn’t figured out how to tell Lex that Kon was alive.
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Part 1
TITLE: The Other Side - 2/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 2
They had him in a room directly facing the sun. Even being half-Kryptonian Kon’s body had needed the jump start the sun provided.
No additional memories leaked through and Clark wondered if it was done, if Kon’s world had simply ceased to exist like J’onn had predicted.
Robin and Wonder Girl were waiting outside the Infirmary doors when he decided to get something to eat.
Both in costume and they had to scan handprints to get in and handprints to get out and since Robin hadn’t managed to hack the computer system yet they were limited to their two hours a day.
Bart breezed past him, not in costume and was in the room before Robin and Wonder Girl had even taken two steps inside.
The door closed behind them.
Kon hadn’t woken yet.
Clark still hadn’t figured out how to tell Lex that Kon was alive.
******************************************************************************
Lex was waiting inside his apartment when he made a rare trip home, sitting on his couch with Mercy standing behind him. Looking as out of place as Clark always had when he’d been in Lex’s space.
They stared at each other and this was the first time in more years then Clark could count where no one had pulled a gun and he wasn’t on his knees from Kryptonite that he couldn’t see.
“I’ve given you every opportunity to tell me what the hell is going on…”
“Kon’s alive,” he blurted out, he couldn’t remember the last time that he’d managed to shock Lex enough that the actual expression showed on his face but there it was.
“You know it’s probably a damn good thing that most of your enemies just try to kill you, because if they tried to capture you, you’d spill all your secrets before they even started in on the good torture.”
“I managed to keep mine from you for years,” Clark glared at him. Lex ignored him.
“Also that’s not quite what I thought you were going to say,” Lex narrowed his eyes. “The hallucinations?”
“Were memories, past events from another Earth. Kon, their Kon ended up here somehow.”
“He doesn’t know how?”
“He hasn’t regained consciousness since I found him.”
“I want to see him.”
Clark stared at him.
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Clark winced at the expression on Lex’s face. “He’s going to expect to see certain things when he wakes up and I’m assuming from the things that I saw that he’s going to expect to see us, together.”
“Lex we haven’t been able to be in a room together without a fight breaking out since I was sixteen.”
“I like to think that we’ve both matured since then.”
“You tried to shoot me, in the head, just six months ago,” Clark reminded him.
“You caught me on a bad day.”
******************************************************************************
To say the Justice League was a little upset about Superman leading Lex Luthor through one of their safe havens would be putting it mildly.
He had to promise to stay with him the entire time, which he’d been planning on doing anyway because there was no way in hell he was leaving him alone with Kon. At least not while Kon was still unconscious and unable to defend himself if Lex decided that the temporary truce was over.
He still had to put up with Batman hovering and Wonder Woman popping in and out trailing her lasso through her fingers and eyeing Lex with suspicion.
The only ones that seemed unfazed by Lex’s position by Kon’s bedside were Robin and Wonder Girl and Clark wondered what he’d missed that those two seemed to take Lex’s presence in stride.
Clark gave him a week before he was bored and ready to go back to war with Superman.
No one put a time limit on how long Lex could spend in the room with Kon, not like they’d been doing with Robin and Wonder Girl and Clark wondered if it was because no one wanted to tell Lex what he could and couldn’t do or if they thought that knowing he was in one place made it easier to keep an eye on what he was doing.
“He moved his hand this morning,” Lex said conversationally three days after he’d started his bedside vigil.
Clark had long since given up the pretense of Superman and was sitting in jeans and a flannel shirt, cross-legged on a second bed that had been moved in at Lex’s direction 12 hours after Clark had brought him to see Kon.
“J’onn and Batman both agree that it’s only a matter of time before he wakes up. His vital signs have been getting stronger by the day.”
Lex nodded, returning his attention to the coffee mug in his hand.
Clark stretched, rolled his neck. He was bored out of his mind, he knew Lex was as well which was the only reason that he stayed. He wasn’t going to be the first to crack.
So he played word games in his mind, he and Lex flung snide remarks at each other at times, reminisced about the past at odd moments.
At night, when it was dark and he should have been asleep or at least faking sleep like Lex, Clark wondered how they were going to handle a Kon that thought they were friends if not something else when he and Lex could barely handle the fragile truce that had sprung up on his behalf.
******************************************************************************
Kon woke nine days after Clark found him at the Fortress.
Lex was giving him a familiar lecture on Alexander the Great that Clark had heard three times when he’d been a teenager and they’d still been something like friends.
“Am I dead?” Kon’s voice was weak and Lex stopped mid-sentence, head whipping around and Clark darted across the room.
There were alarms in the room and they would have already signaled Kon’s waking to those that needed to know. There were two sets of doctors that would be descending on the room in seconds, ones that dealt with Justice League injuries and the ones that Lex had brought in because he didn’t trust the JLA’s doctors.
“No,” Clark wrapped his hand around Kon’s fingers. “Don’t try to move.”
“I’m…” Kon blinked once, eyes drifting shut.
“Kon,” Lex was on the other side of the bed, he’d sat down on the edge and was squeezing Kon’s other hand. Kon’s eyes opened again, not fully, just a sliver.
“Lex?” he blinked again, Clark thought he might be in some pain because his face twisted into a grimace before relaxing slightly.
“No really, am I dead? Because,” Kon tried to lift the hand that Lex was clutching and just let it drop back onto the bed. “You’re both dead… I searched, and searched and searched…” his voice drifted off, growing softer and softer as his eyes closed again.
“Kon?” Clark murmured.
“You’re not dead Kon,” Lex said softly. “You’re not dead and neither are we. It’s a long, long story but you need to be awake to hear it.”
“I’m really tired,” Kon whispered, though he opened his eyes. They were filled with pain and grief and Clark wondered what was taking the doctors so long.
“You’ve slept long enough,” Lex said sternly, Clark glared at him but Lex ignored him in favor of keeping his eyes locked on Kon.
“You’ve slept long enough,” Lex repeated. “You keep your eyes open for a half hour and I promise to not try and kill Clark for a week.”
Kon laughed weakly. “You can’t use that one anymore. I’m not a kid you know, I managed to figure out years ago that you haven’t been actively trying to kill Clark since, you know, I showed up; besides you think I don’t know what you two are up to when you guys are having conferences in your office about my grades? I mean, superhearing guys.”
“I thought we weren’t going to discuss that. Ever.”
Kon grinned, face relaxing slightly. He drifted back off again as the doctors came rushing in.
Lex looked over and met his confused eyes. “You never asked what else I saw.”
******************************************************************************
He should probably be worried that there was evidently a routine in how he and Lex were dealing with Kon.
Lex led the conversations they had with the boy (when he was awake and they’d been assured by two different sets of doctors that Kon’s sleeping of 22 hours a day was perfectly normal) and Clark followed.
Because while Clark had seen the hell that had been the end of Kon’s world, Lex had obviously seen whatever day to day life Kon had been living with Lex and himself prior to it all falling apart.
So Clark had followed Lex’s lead and Batman had warned him that not telling the boy that he wasn’t where he thought he was (not home, never again home, because there’d been just the vaguest of confirmations that Kon’s world had simply ceased to exist) and he’d agreed but…
But Kon was still healing and the two hours a day that he was awake was not enough time to really get into the explanations that would be needed to explain the how and whys of Kon’s place in their world.
Besides the fact that Clark didn’t really understand how Kon was there in the first place.
He was sure that Lex had some ideas but Clark just wasn’t ready to sit through the ensuing lecture without someone there to keep him awake, which meant that he was waiting until Kon could manage to stay awake for more then fifteen minutes at a time to ask for it.
Robin and Wonder Girl had been staples at Kon’s bedside, though he’d not managed to be awake for any of their visits, luckily.
Clark hadn’t mentioned them by name because there was the little voice in the back of his mind that reminded him that Kon thought that Tim and Cassie were dead and that while two miraculous resurrections were relatively easily explained, explaining more then that would cause the boy to question things that they didn’t have answers for.
Like the fact that Clark and Lex weren’t the Clark and Lex that had been sharing parenting duties and instead were a Lex and Clark that could most of the time barely be civil to one another and were only managing it now because of his presence.
So far explanations of any sort hadn’t been an issue, Kon slept and when he was awake Clark wasn’t sure, but he thought that either Batman or Wonder Woman were making sure that their protégé’s were kept busy enough that by the time they got to Kon’s room he was once more asleep again.
And maybe it was the false sense of security, so far there’d been no difficult questions and Kon hadn’t asked to see anybody in particular so it had just been the three of them and the importance of the fact that this wasn’t their Kon and they weren’t his Lex and Clark had started to fade.
And then been thrust right back to the forefront on the occasion of Robin and Wonder Girl’s seventh visit.
Because on that seventh visit Kon was awake, he’d been awake and laughing and then Tim and Cassie had walked into the room both smiling because Kon was awake and Kon had taken one look at them and went so horribly white that Clark had actually feared there was something horribly wrong.
Then he flew from the bed, hitting the wall on the farthest side of the room, where he stumbled and turned and pressed his hands against the wall, his eyes wide and wild and so totally not the boy that had been laughing at Lex just seconds earlier.
This boy was scared and his eyes were scanning the room looking for escape and Clark could already hear Batman’s “I told you so” complete with that damn smug smirk.
There was fear and pain and grief, emotions so palpable that Clark thought he might actually be able to feel them as they darted across Kon’s face lightning fast.
“Kon?” Lex tried to go to him and stopped, stumbling slightly. “What the…?”
“Lex?”
“There’s… some sort of… shield?” Lex said with some confusion. And that hadn’t been one of Kon’s gifts, there’d been the telekinesis and he’d been manifesting some of Clark’s abilities before he’d been killed but…
“Kon?” Cassie’s voice was soft and she touched the invisible barrier that separated them from the boy backed into the wall.
“You’re not…” Kon stopped, shook his head and looked, maybe for the first time, at Lex and Clark. “You’re not my parents,” he said woodenly, his face going eerily blank and distant in a split second.
“Kon, it’s okay,” Lex said quietly, he pressed both hands against the invisible barrier and pushed, like if he pushed hard enough he would be able to push through it. “You’re safe here.”
“That’s what all the bad guys say,” Kon laughed harshly, it sounded bitter and Clark winced.
“It would have worked you know, but they,” he waved a hand at where Tim and Cassie were standing side by side. Cassie’s face was a mixture of sadness and longing, Tim’s face was as blank as Kon’s and Clark wondered if that was where Kon had learned the expression.
“I was there, when… they’re both dead,” tears leaked from his eyes and Kon shook his head, his expression crumpling suddenly.
“I didn’t get there in time for Tim, but Cassie,” he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, slumping down onto the floor. “Cassie died in my arms, right before I got the call that Doomsday had attacked the Fortress.”
His eyes opened, dull and bleak and Clark couldn’t even imagine at what he’d seen. “You took Lex there because you thought he’d be safe, you both died there.”
He took a shaky breath, wiped his eyes. “Where am I?”
“You’re safe,” Lex repeated.
Clark walked up next to Lex, pressed his own hands against the barrier, stared at him until Kon looked up at him.
“Kon-El,” he said quietly, putting all the authority of Superman and Kal-El and his position as Kon’s father into his voice.
The barrier dropped (and they would definitely need to find out how he did that) and nobody moved. Kon still huddled on the floor, a glance at Tim and Cassie showed they both wanted to go to him but were uncertain of their reception.
Clark finally moved to his side, Lex seconds behind and Kon didn’t resist when Clark pulled him into his arms. Just let Clark hold him and he was crying silently against his shoulder when Clark felt one of Lex’s hands press against Clark’s back, the other on the top of Kon’s head.
“I don’t want them here, not yet. I can’t…” Kon whispered against his shoulder. Clark glanced behind him and he didn’t say a word but he knew that the whisper hadn’t been soft enough because there were tears on Cassie’s face and Tim had a hand on her arm pulling her from the room.
Lex was murmuring the same phrase over and over again, so softly that Clark had to strain to hear it.
“You’re safe here, it’s okay, you’re safe here.”
Clark hoped that he was right.
******************************************************************************
Bruce was waiting for him outside Kon’s room when Clark got tired of the unrelenting silence.
Kon hadn’t said a word since Clark and Lex had helped him back into his bed and Tim and Cassie had left. He’d just been silent, Clark couldn’t even remember a time where Kon had been that silent unless unconscious. And it wasn’t like the boy was even angry or sad or anything from what Clark could tell.
He was just… Clark didn’t even know a word that would explain how Kon felt after coming to the realization that this wasn’t his world and that there was an almost 100% chance that his world was gone and everyone that he knew and cared with it.
That there wasn’t any chance that he would open his eyes the next morning to the possibility that it had all been some horrible nightmare, that he’d stumble out of his room to find Clark and Lex laughing over coffee and Tim and Cassie still loving him.
That he hadn’t been alone, even at the end.
“How is he?” Bruce looked awkward; Clark wondered why he was in civilian clothes instead of his uniform.
“He’s…” Clark looked back at the door he’d just come through. If he looked through the door he knew he would see Kon lying in his bed, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. Lex sitting in a chair beside the bed staring at Kon. “He’ll be okay I think… eventually.”
Bruce nodded. “Tim said that he had some sort of… breakdown?”
“What he saw,” Clark leaned against the wall, sighed. “He was there when Cassie died, he says he wasn’t there when Tim died but I’m assuming he probably saw his body. He searched for days for me and Lex, our, my heartbeat the only thing driving him to continue searching for us. He went into a battle that he had absolutely no hope in winning and then woke up here, in a world that has exact replicas of the people that he loved and lost. The breakdown is probably a long time overdue in coming.”
“You don’t have to deal with this by yourself, neither of you do,” Bruce looked as if it pained him to include Lex in his sentiments.
Clark knew that there would be an offer of somewhere safe for them to take Kon, somewhere away from the public eye where the boy could heal in privacy.
Somewhere like Wayne Manor (which Lex would fight tooth and nail) where Bruce could keep a close eye on everything so he could feel like he was in control of a situation that had no controls.
It was an offer that he would have to turn down, because Kon needed time.
Maybe a lot of time before he would be able to look at Tim without seeing the boy that he’d lost, before he could look at Cassie without seeing the girl that had died in his arms.
Before he could look at the two of them and not see the lovers that had left him.
“Maybe after, I think he needs time, to… you know… to realize that while this isn’t his world we do want him here.”
Bruce looked at him.
“He’s not Kon, Clark. This boy thinks of you as his father, he thinks of Lex Luthor as his father.”
“No, he’s not,” Clark agreed. “But maybe if I’d done things the way I should have. If I’d handled things differently, if I’d made even the tiniest bit of an effort to get to know Kon before it was too late…”
“Don’t spend your time wondering what would have happened if you’d done things differently. Hindsight is bliss, but it doesn’t solve anything, and in this case? All it’s going to do is maybe make you make the wrong decisions.”
“Wrong decisions?”
“You’ve left Lex Luthor alone in Superboys’ room. Are you telling me that was a wise decision?”
******************************************************************************
Part 3
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Part 1
TITLE: The Other Side - 2/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 2
They had him in a room directly facing the sun. Even being half-Kryptonian Kon’s body had needed the jump start the sun provided.
No additional memories leaked through and Clark wondered if it was done, if Kon’s world had simply ceased to exist like J’onn had predicted.
Robin and Wonder Girl were waiting outside the Infirmary doors when he decided to get something to eat.
Both in costume and they had to scan handprints to get in and handprints to get out and since Robin hadn’t managed to hack the computer system yet they were limited to their two hours a day.
Bart breezed past him, not in costume and was in the room before Robin and Wonder Girl had even taken two steps inside.
The door closed behind them.
Kon hadn’t woken yet.
Clark still hadn’t figured out how to tell Lex that Kon was alive.
******************************************************************************
Lex was waiting inside his apartment when he made a rare trip home, sitting on his couch with Mercy standing behind him. Looking as out of place as Clark always had when he’d been in Lex’s space.
They stared at each other and this was the first time in more years then Clark could count where no one had pulled a gun and he wasn’t on his knees from Kryptonite that he couldn’t see.
“I’ve given you every opportunity to tell me what the hell is going on…”
“Kon’s alive,” he blurted out, he couldn’t remember the last time that he’d managed to shock Lex enough that the actual expression showed on his face but there it was.
“You know it’s probably a damn good thing that most of your enemies just try to kill you, because if they tried to capture you, you’d spill all your secrets before they even started in on the good torture.”
“I managed to keep mine from you for years,” Clark glared at him. Lex ignored him.
“Also that’s not quite what I thought you were going to say,” Lex narrowed his eyes. “The hallucinations?”
“Were memories, past events from another Earth. Kon, their Kon ended up here somehow.”
“He doesn’t know how?”
“He hasn’t regained consciousness since I found him.”
“I want to see him.”
Clark stared at him.
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Clark winced at the expression on Lex’s face. “He’s going to expect to see certain things when he wakes up and I’m assuming from the things that I saw that he’s going to expect to see us, together.”
“Lex we haven’t been able to be in a room together without a fight breaking out since I was sixteen.”
“I like to think that we’ve both matured since then.”
“You tried to shoot me, in the head, just six months ago,” Clark reminded him.
“You caught me on a bad day.”
******************************************************************************
To say the Justice League was a little upset about Superman leading Lex Luthor through one of their safe havens would be putting it mildly.
He had to promise to stay with him the entire time, which he’d been planning on doing anyway because there was no way in hell he was leaving him alone with Kon. At least not while Kon was still unconscious and unable to defend himself if Lex decided that the temporary truce was over.
He still had to put up with Batman hovering and Wonder Woman popping in and out trailing her lasso through her fingers and eyeing Lex with suspicion.
The only ones that seemed unfazed by Lex’s position by Kon’s bedside were Robin and Wonder Girl and Clark wondered what he’d missed that those two seemed to take Lex’s presence in stride.
Clark gave him a week before he was bored and ready to go back to war with Superman.
No one put a time limit on how long Lex could spend in the room with Kon, not like they’d been doing with Robin and Wonder Girl and Clark wondered if it was because no one wanted to tell Lex what he could and couldn’t do or if they thought that knowing he was in one place made it easier to keep an eye on what he was doing.
“He moved his hand this morning,” Lex said conversationally three days after he’d started his bedside vigil.
Clark had long since given up the pretense of Superman and was sitting in jeans and a flannel shirt, cross-legged on a second bed that had been moved in at Lex’s direction 12 hours after Clark had brought him to see Kon.
“J’onn and Batman both agree that it’s only a matter of time before he wakes up. His vital signs have been getting stronger by the day.”
Lex nodded, returning his attention to the coffee mug in his hand.
Clark stretched, rolled his neck. He was bored out of his mind, he knew Lex was as well which was the only reason that he stayed. He wasn’t going to be the first to crack.
So he played word games in his mind, he and Lex flung snide remarks at each other at times, reminisced about the past at odd moments.
At night, when it was dark and he should have been asleep or at least faking sleep like Lex, Clark wondered how they were going to handle a Kon that thought they were friends if not something else when he and Lex could barely handle the fragile truce that had sprung up on his behalf.
******************************************************************************
Kon woke nine days after Clark found him at the Fortress.
Lex was giving him a familiar lecture on Alexander the Great that Clark had heard three times when he’d been a teenager and they’d still been something like friends.
“Am I dead?” Kon’s voice was weak and Lex stopped mid-sentence, head whipping around and Clark darted across the room.
There were alarms in the room and they would have already signaled Kon’s waking to those that needed to know. There were two sets of doctors that would be descending on the room in seconds, ones that dealt with Justice League injuries and the ones that Lex had brought in because he didn’t trust the JLA’s doctors.
“No,” Clark wrapped his hand around Kon’s fingers. “Don’t try to move.”
“I’m…” Kon blinked once, eyes drifting shut.
“Kon,” Lex was on the other side of the bed, he’d sat down on the edge and was squeezing Kon’s other hand. Kon’s eyes opened again, not fully, just a sliver.
“Lex?” he blinked again, Clark thought he might be in some pain because his face twisted into a grimace before relaxing slightly.
“No really, am I dead? Because,” Kon tried to lift the hand that Lex was clutching and just let it drop back onto the bed. “You’re both dead… I searched, and searched and searched…” his voice drifted off, growing softer and softer as his eyes closed again.
“Kon?” Clark murmured.
“You’re not dead Kon,” Lex said softly. “You’re not dead and neither are we. It’s a long, long story but you need to be awake to hear it.”
“I’m really tired,” Kon whispered, though he opened his eyes. They were filled with pain and grief and Clark wondered what was taking the doctors so long.
“You’ve slept long enough,” Lex said sternly, Clark glared at him but Lex ignored him in favor of keeping his eyes locked on Kon.
“You’ve slept long enough,” Lex repeated. “You keep your eyes open for a half hour and I promise to not try and kill Clark for a week.”
Kon laughed weakly. “You can’t use that one anymore. I’m not a kid you know, I managed to figure out years ago that you haven’t been actively trying to kill Clark since, you know, I showed up; besides you think I don’t know what you two are up to when you guys are having conferences in your office about my grades? I mean, superhearing guys.”
“I thought we weren’t going to discuss that. Ever.”
Kon grinned, face relaxing slightly. He drifted back off again as the doctors came rushing in.
Lex looked over and met his confused eyes. “You never asked what else I saw.”
******************************************************************************
He should probably be worried that there was evidently a routine in how he and Lex were dealing with Kon.
Lex led the conversations they had with the boy (when he was awake and they’d been assured by two different sets of doctors that Kon’s sleeping of 22 hours a day was perfectly normal) and Clark followed.
Because while Clark had seen the hell that had been the end of Kon’s world, Lex had obviously seen whatever day to day life Kon had been living with Lex and himself prior to it all falling apart.
So Clark had followed Lex’s lead and Batman had warned him that not telling the boy that he wasn’t where he thought he was (not home, never again home, because there’d been just the vaguest of confirmations that Kon’s world had simply ceased to exist) and he’d agreed but…
But Kon was still healing and the two hours a day that he was awake was not enough time to really get into the explanations that would be needed to explain the how and whys of Kon’s place in their world.
Besides the fact that Clark didn’t really understand how Kon was there in the first place.
He was sure that Lex had some ideas but Clark just wasn’t ready to sit through the ensuing lecture without someone there to keep him awake, which meant that he was waiting until Kon could manage to stay awake for more then fifteen minutes at a time to ask for it.
Robin and Wonder Girl had been staples at Kon’s bedside, though he’d not managed to be awake for any of their visits, luckily.
Clark hadn’t mentioned them by name because there was the little voice in the back of his mind that reminded him that Kon thought that Tim and Cassie were dead and that while two miraculous resurrections were relatively easily explained, explaining more then that would cause the boy to question things that they didn’t have answers for.
Like the fact that Clark and Lex weren’t the Clark and Lex that had been sharing parenting duties and instead were a Lex and Clark that could most of the time barely be civil to one another and were only managing it now because of his presence.
So far explanations of any sort hadn’t been an issue, Kon slept and when he was awake Clark wasn’t sure, but he thought that either Batman or Wonder Woman were making sure that their protégé’s were kept busy enough that by the time they got to Kon’s room he was once more asleep again.
And maybe it was the false sense of security, so far there’d been no difficult questions and Kon hadn’t asked to see anybody in particular so it had just been the three of them and the importance of the fact that this wasn’t their Kon and they weren’t his Lex and Clark had started to fade.
And then been thrust right back to the forefront on the occasion of Robin and Wonder Girl’s seventh visit.
Because on that seventh visit Kon was awake, he’d been awake and laughing and then Tim and Cassie had walked into the room both smiling because Kon was awake and Kon had taken one look at them and went so horribly white that Clark had actually feared there was something horribly wrong.
Then he flew from the bed, hitting the wall on the farthest side of the room, where he stumbled and turned and pressed his hands against the wall, his eyes wide and wild and so totally not the boy that had been laughing at Lex just seconds earlier.
This boy was scared and his eyes were scanning the room looking for escape and Clark could already hear Batman’s “I told you so” complete with that damn smug smirk.
There was fear and pain and grief, emotions so palpable that Clark thought he might actually be able to feel them as they darted across Kon’s face lightning fast.
“Kon?” Lex tried to go to him and stopped, stumbling slightly. “What the…?”
“Lex?”
“There’s… some sort of… shield?” Lex said with some confusion. And that hadn’t been one of Kon’s gifts, there’d been the telekinesis and he’d been manifesting some of Clark’s abilities before he’d been killed but…
“Kon?” Cassie’s voice was soft and she touched the invisible barrier that separated them from the boy backed into the wall.
“You’re not…” Kon stopped, shook his head and looked, maybe for the first time, at Lex and Clark. “You’re not my parents,” he said woodenly, his face going eerily blank and distant in a split second.
“Kon, it’s okay,” Lex said quietly, he pressed both hands against the invisible barrier and pushed, like if he pushed hard enough he would be able to push through it. “You’re safe here.”
“That’s what all the bad guys say,” Kon laughed harshly, it sounded bitter and Clark winced.
“It would have worked you know, but they,” he waved a hand at where Tim and Cassie were standing side by side. Cassie’s face was a mixture of sadness and longing, Tim’s face was as blank as Kon’s and Clark wondered if that was where Kon had learned the expression.
“I was there, when… they’re both dead,” tears leaked from his eyes and Kon shook his head, his expression crumpling suddenly.
“I didn’t get there in time for Tim, but Cassie,” he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, slumping down onto the floor. “Cassie died in my arms, right before I got the call that Doomsday had attacked the Fortress.”
His eyes opened, dull and bleak and Clark couldn’t even imagine at what he’d seen. “You took Lex there because you thought he’d be safe, you both died there.”
He took a shaky breath, wiped his eyes. “Where am I?”
“You’re safe,” Lex repeated.
Clark walked up next to Lex, pressed his own hands against the barrier, stared at him until Kon looked up at him.
“Kon-El,” he said quietly, putting all the authority of Superman and Kal-El and his position as Kon’s father into his voice.
The barrier dropped (and they would definitely need to find out how he did that) and nobody moved. Kon still huddled on the floor, a glance at Tim and Cassie showed they both wanted to go to him but were uncertain of their reception.
Clark finally moved to his side, Lex seconds behind and Kon didn’t resist when Clark pulled him into his arms. Just let Clark hold him and he was crying silently against his shoulder when Clark felt one of Lex’s hands press against Clark’s back, the other on the top of Kon’s head.
“I don’t want them here, not yet. I can’t…” Kon whispered against his shoulder. Clark glanced behind him and he didn’t say a word but he knew that the whisper hadn’t been soft enough because there were tears on Cassie’s face and Tim had a hand on her arm pulling her from the room.
Lex was murmuring the same phrase over and over again, so softly that Clark had to strain to hear it.
“You’re safe here, it’s okay, you’re safe here.”
Clark hoped that he was right.
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Bruce was waiting for him outside Kon’s room when Clark got tired of the unrelenting silence.
Kon hadn’t said a word since Clark and Lex had helped him back into his bed and Tim and Cassie had left. He’d just been silent, Clark couldn’t even remember a time where Kon had been that silent unless unconscious. And it wasn’t like the boy was even angry or sad or anything from what Clark could tell.
He was just… Clark didn’t even know a word that would explain how Kon felt after coming to the realization that this wasn’t his world and that there was an almost 100% chance that his world was gone and everyone that he knew and cared with it.
That there wasn’t any chance that he would open his eyes the next morning to the possibility that it had all been some horrible nightmare, that he’d stumble out of his room to find Clark and Lex laughing over coffee and Tim and Cassie still loving him.
That he hadn’t been alone, even at the end.
“How is he?” Bruce looked awkward; Clark wondered why he was in civilian clothes instead of his uniform.
“He’s…” Clark looked back at the door he’d just come through. If he looked through the door he knew he would see Kon lying in his bed, flat on his back, staring at the ceiling. Lex sitting in a chair beside the bed staring at Kon. “He’ll be okay I think… eventually.”
Bruce nodded. “Tim said that he had some sort of… breakdown?”
“What he saw,” Clark leaned against the wall, sighed. “He was there when Cassie died, he says he wasn’t there when Tim died but I’m assuming he probably saw his body. He searched for days for me and Lex, our, my heartbeat the only thing driving him to continue searching for us. He went into a battle that he had absolutely no hope in winning and then woke up here, in a world that has exact replicas of the people that he loved and lost. The breakdown is probably a long time overdue in coming.”
“You don’t have to deal with this by yourself, neither of you do,” Bruce looked as if it pained him to include Lex in his sentiments.
Clark knew that there would be an offer of somewhere safe for them to take Kon, somewhere away from the public eye where the boy could heal in privacy.
Somewhere like Wayne Manor (which Lex would fight tooth and nail) where Bruce could keep a close eye on everything so he could feel like he was in control of a situation that had no controls.
It was an offer that he would have to turn down, because Kon needed time.
Maybe a lot of time before he would be able to look at Tim without seeing the boy that he’d lost, before he could look at Cassie without seeing the girl that had died in his arms.
Before he could look at the two of them and not see the lovers that had left him.
“Maybe after, I think he needs time, to… you know… to realize that while this isn’t his world we do want him here.”
Bruce looked at him.
“He’s not Kon, Clark. This boy thinks of you as his father, he thinks of Lex Luthor as his father.”
“No, he’s not,” Clark agreed. “But maybe if I’d done things the way I should have. If I’d handled things differently, if I’d made even the tiniest bit of an effort to get to know Kon before it was too late…”
“Don’t spend your time wondering what would have happened if you’d done things differently. Hindsight is bliss, but it doesn’t solve anything, and in this case? All it’s going to do is maybe make you make the wrong decisions.”
“Wrong decisions?”
“You’ve left Lex Luthor alone in Superboys’ room. Are you telling me that was a wise decision?”
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Part 3