FIC: "Reunion", Part 18 of ?? (PG-13, language) (Smallville)
Previous Parts
Eighteen
Clark stopped suddenly, finding himself home again. He was exhausted - not exactly physically tired, which didn’t happen to him very often, but tired nonetheless. He had been curious about the space ship - he couldn’t deny that - and he had wanted to follow Lois inside, to see what it was like, to see…to see his birth parents in something more familiar to them than a human house on Earth. He remembered hesitating at the side of the road, and then at the side of the ship itself, and Lois’s attempt to coax him into climbing up, and then -
It was black, and shiny, and I touched it, and then -
And then -
He sat down on the porch steps and ran a hand through his hair. It reminded me of my ship - the color, and the way it felt under my fingertips, and a little something of its shape, and there was even a smell that was the same - and then I remembered what I did, what happened to my ship, and I couldn’t stand feeling like that again.
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. There were a lot of mistakes he’d made these last four years, ever since he found out that his adoption hadn’t quite been normal, but what had happened at the end of his sophomore year was at the top of the list. And it was definitely at the top of the list of Things He’d Rather Not Think About.
He crossed his arms over his legs and hung his head. It was the closest thing to curling up into a ball that he could do on the porch steps. He heard the footsteps - light and feminine - approaching the door, then the squeak of the hinges as the door opened, and the faint change in Chloe’s breath when she saw him. He could see the frown in his mind, like all the other times she’d breathed differently and scrunched up her eyebrows and frowned and said - “Clark?”
He didn’t respond. If he had been human - if he were normal - she would have surprised him.
But he wasn’t normal, or human. This had been drilled into him over the last four years. The arrival of his birth parents - and their space ship - was simply the frosting on the cake. If he had been just another guy, Chloe would have caught him by surprise - but instead, being what he was, he could practically hear the moment she decided to join him on the porch.
He heard the door close behind her and those same footsteps - louder and clearer now that they were on the same side of the wall - as she approached. And he didn’t have to hear her come closer - he could feel the warmth of her body as it neared, even in the seasonable weather. Movement made ripples in the air just like sound, and when he concentrated, he could feel the difference. He felt Chloe coming the entire way.
Sometimes he missed being surprised.
“So,” she said, sitting down beside him, “once again I find you brooding and alone. This is a really bad habit with you, you know.”
He gave in and sat up straight, pulling his long legs up and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I thought you liked broody guys,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. Or possibly deflect attention. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing.
She smirked, but he could see that it was covering concern. “Well, some broody guys. I mean, on TV and in movies, you know? Not so much in real life,” she replied. “Happy-go-lucky is more my thing in reality, I think.”
“Ah.”
He couldn’t hear her thoughts - that was a power he was glad he hadn’t developed - but he could imagine that she felt as awkward as he did. She probably wanted to know what was wrong, why he had showed up alone, but didn’t know how to ask without being blunt. And considering what she’d seen these last few hours, he could imagine that she didn’t think he’d appreciate that right now.
He took the first step.
“I freaked out a little,” he said.
She had been looking out into the dark, but the moment he spoke she turned back towards him. “Are you up to elaborating?” she asked. “Or is this a time where I just go, ‘hm, okay, must be some weird alien thing, he’ll explain it later’?”
He looked away. “You remember the end of our sophomore year, when I ran away, there was that explosion here on the farm?”
“Of course.”
“I caused the explosion.”
He could hear the momentary change in her breath. “Okay.”
“They sent me here in a ship, and when Mom and Dad brought me home, they brought the ship with them and hid it in the storm cellar.”
“Okay.”
Considering the lack of freaking out on her part, maybe he should have told Chloe the truth ages ago, Wall of Weird or not. “The ship started talking to me - I guess that’s the easiest way to explain it - claiming it was giving me messages from Jor-El. It made demands, wanted me to do things.”
She pursed her lips. “You could have told me,” she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “I would have kept the secret. I could have helped.”
He turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry I didn’t, Chlo,” he admitted. “There have been times when I wanted to tell you so badly - you’re my best friend, you know? I wish I had told you - maybe things would’ve happened differently.”
She nodded. “But go on - you were trying to tell me something just now.”
“Right. The messages from the ship. I ended up blowing it up because I was tired of hearing it basically tell me to conquer Earth.”
“Okay,” she said after a moment, “one of these days you’re going to tell me just what these messages said, because so far Jor-El and Lara don’t strike me as the ‘Hail, Caesar’ type, and then you’re going to explain how you blew up a spaceship and no one knew about it, but right now I’m more interested in why you freaked out enough a little while ago that you came home ahead of schedule.”
“Fair enough,” he replied. “You know that Mom lost her baby that day, right?” When she nodded, he continued: “Me blowing up the ship is what caused the truck to flip, and that’s how she lost the baby.”
“Oh, god, Clark,” she whispered. “No wonder you were so messed up that summer - that’s why you ran away, isn’t it? You blamed yourself for that.”
“It wasn’t just me - when I went to the hospital, when I realized what had happened, Dad wouldn’t let me see her. He knew what had happened - he blamed me. And I know, looking back, that he was mostly just really upset, and there were all these issues, and it wasn’t just me and my alien weirdness causing yet another problem, but even now I can’t think back on it and not be upset at myself, you know? Because even though I had serious issues about Mom and Dad having a baby, I thought it would be really great to have a little brother or sister.”
“Kind of preaching to the choir here, Clark,” she told him. “I’m an only child, too.”
“Anyway,” he said, getting back on track, “I freaked out because when I saw their ship, it reminded me of mine a little - mostly the color, I think. Lois got my attention and I shook it off, but then we got closer and I went to climb inside… I touched it, and it felt like my ship. Whatever it’s made out of, it’s the same stuff they used all those years ago when they built my ship - and the last time I saw it, I was blowing it up in the storm cellar, and I was pissed, and upset, and then it all got worse because Mom lost the baby, and so when I touched their ship, I remembered all of that, and it was the only thing I could think of, and I freaked out.”
“And ran back home,” she finished for him. She sat there a moment, biting her lip. “Are you going to be okay when they get back here? I mean, it can’t be too much longer, right?”
“Any second now, actually,” he said, hearing the sound of Lois’s car approaching. He’d probably heard it, faintly, just out of his conscious perception, from the beginning, from the moment she started the engine again, but now that he chose to concentrate on it, it was obvious and near. And following it, in the sky, he could make out the outline of the ship, a different black than the heavens, quietly moving just above the treetops.
Sometimes having superhuman abilities weren’t so bad.
“But are you going to be okay?” Chloe pressed, and he didn’t blame her. If he was going to freak out again, now would be the time to admit it and get the hell out of Dodge before he caused any more problems. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I think I’ll be okay. At least for now.”
“Let me guess - you reserve the right to freak out at any time, starting tomorrow morning, after a decent night’s sleep, for the rest of the time that your birth family is on the planet?” she said, only half-teasing. Maybe three-quarters teasing - he knew that grin on her face.
“More or less,” he told her. “But yeah, I think I’m okay for right now. I think - I think telling you why I freaked out helped, you know?”
She smiled. “Then consider me your personal anti-freaking-out soundboard.”
The headlights of Lois’s SUV turned onto their driveway.
He stood up and then turned and pulled Chloe up as well, before she had the time to protest, and climbed down the porch steps. She followed and together they stood as Lois parked and got out of her car. One ear on her footsteps, he looked up into the sky and watched the ship approach.
“You okay, Smallville?” Lois asked as she came to stand beside them.
He heard the door open again and a set of familiar footsteps and another less familiar - his mom and Zor-El - came out onto the porch. Mom must have heard Lois’s car, he thought, or me and Chloe talking.
“Yeah,” he said, bringing his eyes back to Earth again. “For now, at least.”
“Good,” Lois replied. He kept waiting for her to say something more - this was the girl who didn’t like awkward silences, after all - but that was all that she said.
Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
Beside him, Chloe gasped and he returned his attention to the sky. Lights on the underside of the ship - landing lights? - had come on, showing even the normal people where the ship was as it slowly came down to Earth. “That is so cool,” Chloe whispered.
“Wow,” Lois said in turn.
His mom took in a deep breath of surprise.
He smiled. “Yeah,” he simply said and kept watching. Maybe things won’t be so bad after all. Maybe…maybe it’ll even be kind of cool.
The first thought that occurred to Lex Luthor as he regained consciousness was how badly his head ached.
Lex rubbed his hand against his forehead - I half expected to feel hair just now, he realized. Why would I…
He remembered sitting in his car outside the Kent farm and deciding to come to the Kawatchee caves, knowing that Clark was otherwise engaged.
Jor-El.
Lara Lor-Van.
He jerked his head up. Where the hell did that come from? How did I know that those were the names of the people with Clark? What the hell kind of names are those anyway?
Shaking slightly, he forced himself to stand up - a big mistake in retrospect. He felt dizzy, slightly sick to his stomach. It reminded him of waking up in the hospital after the meteor shower, and he did not make the comparison lightly. He braced himself against the wall, pushing himself forward bit by bit. He felt the rough texture of the rock, but he felt no pain - he should have felt something: maybe the rock wouldn’t cut or scrape his skin here, since some sections of the rock walls were smoother than others, but he should have felt some discomfort. And yet he felt none.
What the fuck happened to me?
He had driven to the caves, as he had done countless times since their discovery the year before. He had been alone, completely alone, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. That had been unusual - so often the caves felt strangely peaceful, rather than frightening or discomforting. His attention had been drawn to the figure of Naman and Segeeth, and a strange symbol that had formed underneath it. He had reached out, brushing his fingers across the symbol, trying to remember if he’d ever seen it there or elsewhere in the cave before, and then -
- a bright light enveloped him -
- and then he woke up on the ground and his head hurt.
He propelled himself further along the cave wall. It was getting easier - the dizziness was subsiding, and his legs seemed to be cooperating more as time passed. He was still using the rock wall as support, his arms taking turns bracing him -
Something burned the palm of his left hand.
He hissed and pulled away, turning slightly so that his back was against the wall. The shape of the burn was familiar, a symbol he’d seen before, but the mirror image of it, maybe. He looked back at the wall, at the spot he had touched. It was the symbol that always reminded him of Alexander’s shield, the serpent-shield, the lopsided pentagon with the twisted S-shape inside -
The sigil of the House of El.
He took a deep breath and stared at his hand as the brand faded.
I watched that burn heal right before my eyes. I heal fast, but not that fast. Something happened to me.
Something changed me.
Perhaps due to shock, perhaps thanks to adrenaline, the dizziness had faded completely, and his legs seemed solid again. He ran out of the caves, back to reality, back to his car. The hood was cool - how long was I in there? - but the cool metal felt good against the spot on his hand where the burn had been and he stood there a moment, catching his breath.
He found his keys in his pocket and fumbled for them, finally unlocking the door not by the key but by the remote button, and climbed in. After a moment, he managed to get the key in the ignition and started the engine. He glanced in the rearview mirror as he went into reverse -
“Hello, Lex of the House of Luthor.”
He slammed on the brake. For a moment he had seen a different face in the mirror - not his own, but another man: dark hair - blacker than Clark’s - with a goatee, and small, penetrating eyes. Sinister. Vaguely reminiscent of his father - not so much in appearance, but in the bearing, and the cruelty in those eyes. And he had heard the voice - not through the air, as he originally thought, but he realized it had been inside him.
Something is inside me.
He shivered - and the voice returned:
My timetable has been moved up, son of Luthor. Unfortunate, but I should never have underestimated Jor-El’s resolve. Do not fear the inevitable: I believe this has been your destiny since the day the youngest son of the House of El arrived on your strange little planet. You will serve as a fine vessel to finally bring my vengeance on the House of El to fruition.
“What the hell are you?” Lex demanded of the voice.
It chuckled. You may call me whatever you like, human, for before long you will no longer matter. But, if you so desire, there is a name you may address me by, the title I once held which was wrongly stripped away. The name by which this backwards planet will soon know its conqueror:
I am General Zod.
END PART EIGHTEEN
END OF “FRIDAY”
TBC IN “SATURDAY”, BEGINNING WITH PART NINETEEN
Eighteen
Clark stopped suddenly, finding himself home again. He was exhausted - not exactly physically tired, which didn’t happen to him very often, but tired nonetheless. He had been curious about the space ship - he couldn’t deny that - and he had wanted to follow Lois inside, to see what it was like, to see…to see his birth parents in something more familiar to them than a human house on Earth. He remembered hesitating at the side of the road, and then at the side of the ship itself, and Lois’s attempt to coax him into climbing up, and then -
It was black, and shiny, and I touched it, and then -
And then -
He sat down on the porch steps and ran a hand through his hair. It reminded me of my ship - the color, and the way it felt under my fingertips, and a little something of its shape, and there was even a smell that was the same - and then I remembered what I did, what happened to my ship, and I couldn’t stand feeling like that again.
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. There were a lot of mistakes he’d made these last four years, ever since he found out that his adoption hadn’t quite been normal, but what had happened at the end of his sophomore year was at the top of the list. And it was definitely at the top of the list of Things He’d Rather Not Think About.
He crossed his arms over his legs and hung his head. It was the closest thing to curling up into a ball that he could do on the porch steps. He heard the footsteps - light and feminine - approaching the door, then the squeak of the hinges as the door opened, and the faint change in Chloe’s breath when she saw him. He could see the frown in his mind, like all the other times she’d breathed differently and scrunched up her eyebrows and frowned and said - “Clark?”
He didn’t respond. If he had been human - if he were normal - she would have surprised him.
But he wasn’t normal, or human. This had been drilled into him over the last four years. The arrival of his birth parents - and their space ship - was simply the frosting on the cake. If he had been just another guy, Chloe would have caught him by surprise - but instead, being what he was, he could practically hear the moment she decided to join him on the porch.
He heard the door close behind her and those same footsteps - louder and clearer now that they were on the same side of the wall - as she approached. And he didn’t have to hear her come closer - he could feel the warmth of her body as it neared, even in the seasonable weather. Movement made ripples in the air just like sound, and when he concentrated, he could feel the difference. He felt Chloe coming the entire way.
Sometimes he missed being surprised.
“So,” she said, sitting down beside him, “once again I find you brooding and alone. This is a really bad habit with you, you know.”
He gave in and sat up straight, pulling his long legs up and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I thought you liked broody guys,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. Or possibly deflect attention. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing.
She smirked, but he could see that it was covering concern. “Well, some broody guys. I mean, on TV and in movies, you know? Not so much in real life,” she replied. “Happy-go-lucky is more my thing in reality, I think.”
“Ah.”
He couldn’t hear her thoughts - that was a power he was glad he hadn’t developed - but he could imagine that she felt as awkward as he did. She probably wanted to know what was wrong, why he had showed up alone, but didn’t know how to ask without being blunt. And considering what she’d seen these last few hours, he could imagine that she didn’t think he’d appreciate that right now.
He took the first step.
“I freaked out a little,” he said.
She had been looking out into the dark, but the moment he spoke she turned back towards him. “Are you up to elaborating?” she asked. “Or is this a time where I just go, ‘hm, okay, must be some weird alien thing, he’ll explain it later’?”
He looked away. “You remember the end of our sophomore year, when I ran away, there was that explosion here on the farm?”
“Of course.”
“I caused the explosion.”
He could hear the momentary change in her breath. “Okay.”
“They sent me here in a ship, and when Mom and Dad brought me home, they brought the ship with them and hid it in the storm cellar.”
“Okay.”
Considering the lack of freaking out on her part, maybe he should have told Chloe the truth ages ago, Wall of Weird or not. “The ship started talking to me - I guess that’s the easiest way to explain it - claiming it was giving me messages from Jor-El. It made demands, wanted me to do things.”
She pursed her lips. “You could have told me,” she said, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “I would have kept the secret. I could have helped.”
He turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry I didn’t, Chlo,” he admitted. “There have been times when I wanted to tell you so badly - you’re my best friend, you know? I wish I had told you - maybe things would’ve happened differently.”
She nodded. “But go on - you were trying to tell me something just now.”
“Right. The messages from the ship. I ended up blowing it up because I was tired of hearing it basically tell me to conquer Earth.”
“Okay,” she said after a moment, “one of these days you’re going to tell me just what these messages said, because so far Jor-El and Lara don’t strike me as the ‘Hail, Caesar’ type, and then you’re going to explain how you blew up a spaceship and no one knew about it, but right now I’m more interested in why you freaked out enough a little while ago that you came home ahead of schedule.”
“Fair enough,” he replied. “You know that Mom lost her baby that day, right?” When she nodded, he continued: “Me blowing up the ship is what caused the truck to flip, and that’s how she lost the baby.”
“Oh, god, Clark,” she whispered. “No wonder you were so messed up that summer - that’s why you ran away, isn’t it? You blamed yourself for that.”
“It wasn’t just me - when I went to the hospital, when I realized what had happened, Dad wouldn’t let me see her. He knew what had happened - he blamed me. And I know, looking back, that he was mostly just really upset, and there were all these issues, and it wasn’t just me and my alien weirdness causing yet another problem, but even now I can’t think back on it and not be upset at myself, you know? Because even though I had serious issues about Mom and Dad having a baby, I thought it would be really great to have a little brother or sister.”
“Kind of preaching to the choir here, Clark,” she told him. “I’m an only child, too.”
“Anyway,” he said, getting back on track, “I freaked out because when I saw their ship, it reminded me of mine a little - mostly the color, I think. Lois got my attention and I shook it off, but then we got closer and I went to climb inside… I touched it, and it felt like my ship. Whatever it’s made out of, it’s the same stuff they used all those years ago when they built my ship - and the last time I saw it, I was blowing it up in the storm cellar, and I was pissed, and upset, and then it all got worse because Mom lost the baby, and so when I touched their ship, I remembered all of that, and it was the only thing I could think of, and I freaked out.”
“And ran back home,” she finished for him. She sat there a moment, biting her lip. “Are you going to be okay when they get back here? I mean, it can’t be too much longer, right?”
“Any second now, actually,” he said, hearing the sound of Lois’s car approaching. He’d probably heard it, faintly, just out of his conscious perception, from the beginning, from the moment she started the engine again, but now that he chose to concentrate on it, it was obvious and near. And following it, in the sky, he could make out the outline of the ship, a different black than the heavens, quietly moving just above the treetops.
Sometimes having superhuman abilities weren’t so bad.
“But are you going to be okay?” Chloe pressed, and he didn’t blame her. If he was going to freak out again, now would be the time to admit it and get the hell out of Dodge before he caused any more problems. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I think I’ll be okay. At least for now.”
“Let me guess - you reserve the right to freak out at any time, starting tomorrow morning, after a decent night’s sleep, for the rest of the time that your birth family is on the planet?” she said, only half-teasing. Maybe three-quarters teasing - he knew that grin on her face.
“More or less,” he told her. “But yeah, I think I’m okay for right now. I think - I think telling you why I freaked out helped, you know?”
She smiled. “Then consider me your personal anti-freaking-out soundboard.”
The headlights of Lois’s SUV turned onto their driveway.
He stood up and then turned and pulled Chloe up as well, before she had the time to protest, and climbed down the porch steps. She followed and together they stood as Lois parked and got out of her car. One ear on her footsteps, he looked up into the sky and watched the ship approach.
“You okay, Smallville?” Lois asked as she came to stand beside them.
He heard the door open again and a set of familiar footsteps and another less familiar - his mom and Zor-El - came out onto the porch. Mom must have heard Lois’s car, he thought, or me and Chloe talking.
“Yeah,” he said, bringing his eyes back to Earth again. “For now, at least.”
“Good,” Lois replied. He kept waiting for her to say something more - this was the girl who didn’t like awkward silences, after all - but that was all that she said.
Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
Beside him, Chloe gasped and he returned his attention to the sky. Lights on the underside of the ship - landing lights? - had come on, showing even the normal people where the ship was as it slowly came down to Earth. “That is so cool,” Chloe whispered.
“Wow,” Lois said in turn.
His mom took in a deep breath of surprise.
He smiled. “Yeah,” he simply said and kept watching. Maybe things won’t be so bad after all. Maybe…maybe it’ll even be kind of cool.
The first thought that occurred to Lex Luthor as he regained consciousness was how badly his head ached.
Lex rubbed his hand against his forehead - I half expected to feel hair just now, he realized. Why would I…
He remembered sitting in his car outside the Kent farm and deciding to come to the Kawatchee caves, knowing that Clark was otherwise engaged.
Jor-El.
Lara Lor-Van.
He jerked his head up. Where the hell did that come from? How did I know that those were the names of the people with Clark? What the hell kind of names are those anyway?
Shaking slightly, he forced himself to stand up - a big mistake in retrospect. He felt dizzy, slightly sick to his stomach. It reminded him of waking up in the hospital after the meteor shower, and he did not make the comparison lightly. He braced himself against the wall, pushing himself forward bit by bit. He felt the rough texture of the rock, but he felt no pain - he should have felt something: maybe the rock wouldn’t cut or scrape his skin here, since some sections of the rock walls were smoother than others, but he should have felt some discomfort. And yet he felt none.
What the fuck happened to me?
He had driven to the caves, as he had done countless times since their discovery the year before. He had been alone, completely alone, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. That had been unusual - so often the caves felt strangely peaceful, rather than frightening or discomforting. His attention had been drawn to the figure of Naman and Segeeth, and a strange symbol that had formed underneath it. He had reached out, brushing his fingers across the symbol, trying to remember if he’d ever seen it there or elsewhere in the cave before, and then -
- a bright light enveloped him -
- and then he woke up on the ground and his head hurt.
He propelled himself further along the cave wall. It was getting easier - the dizziness was subsiding, and his legs seemed to be cooperating more as time passed. He was still using the rock wall as support, his arms taking turns bracing him -
Something burned the palm of his left hand.
He hissed and pulled away, turning slightly so that his back was against the wall. The shape of the burn was familiar, a symbol he’d seen before, but the mirror image of it, maybe. He looked back at the wall, at the spot he had touched. It was the symbol that always reminded him of Alexander’s shield, the serpent-shield, the lopsided pentagon with the twisted S-shape inside -
The sigil of the House of El.
He took a deep breath and stared at his hand as the brand faded.
I watched that burn heal right before my eyes. I heal fast, but not that fast. Something happened to me.
Something changed me.
Perhaps due to shock, perhaps thanks to adrenaline, the dizziness had faded completely, and his legs seemed solid again. He ran out of the caves, back to reality, back to his car. The hood was cool - how long was I in there? - but the cool metal felt good against the spot on his hand where the burn had been and he stood there a moment, catching his breath.
He found his keys in his pocket and fumbled for them, finally unlocking the door not by the key but by the remote button, and climbed in. After a moment, he managed to get the key in the ignition and started the engine. He glanced in the rearview mirror as he went into reverse -
“Hello, Lex of the House of Luthor.”
He slammed on the brake. For a moment he had seen a different face in the mirror - not his own, but another man: dark hair - blacker than Clark’s - with a goatee, and small, penetrating eyes. Sinister. Vaguely reminiscent of his father - not so much in appearance, but in the bearing, and the cruelty in those eyes. And he had heard the voice - not through the air, as he originally thought, but he realized it had been inside him.
Something is inside me.
He shivered - and the voice returned:
My timetable has been moved up, son of Luthor. Unfortunate, but I should never have underestimated Jor-El’s resolve. Do not fear the inevitable: I believe this has been your destiny since the day the youngest son of the House of El arrived on your strange little planet. You will serve as a fine vessel to finally bring my vengeance on the House of El to fruition.
“What the hell are you?” Lex demanded of the voice.
It chuckled. You may call me whatever you like, human, for before long you will no longer matter. But, if you so desire, there is a name you may address me by, the title I once held which was wrongly stripped away. The name by which this backwards planet will soon know its conqueror:
I am General Zod.
END PART EIGHTEEN
END OF “FRIDAY”
TBC IN “SATURDAY”, BEGINNING WITH PART NINETEEN