Fic: The Dark Side

[bagheera_san]

I said: give me prompts for AU fic!

hils said: SV, Clex, The boys are demon hunters (something in the ilk of Supernatural or Buffy)

attaccabottoni said:
- SANDMAN AU!
(I swear I've read fic in this theme too, but I could be imagining Magneto instead of Lex, according to my fuzzy memory. Still, it would be interesting even if it's just about Delirium giving Lex the time of the day, or Clark having a chat with Death.)
- GOOD OMENS AU!
(Or even just some random angel and/or demon visiting the SV-verse. I'm a sucker for Heaven/Hell creatures in fics. Aziraphale and Clark could bond over the goodness of humanity and destiny, and Lex and Crowley would discuss cars and the mechanics of having not so much fallen as sauntered vaguely downwards. OR something cliche-ish like Aziraphale saving Lex from peril and Lex developing an interest in him, Clark and Crowley would get jealous...)

My mind moves in mysterious ways and combined all these. The product is AU, but it's also sort of a crossover.

Title: The Dark Side (1/2)

Fandom: SV/Good Omens/Buffy/Sandman crossover. All you have to know, though, is SV canon and ... there's magic? And demons? Spot the cameos!
Warnings: character death (Lionel), molestation of a minor hinted at (no incest), mention of suicide
Rating: teens
Length: 2725 words
Summary: This is how Lex became a demon hunting chaos mage.



It was a grey, rainy day in late September 1994 when Lionel Luthor was murdered. It's hard to say whether it was the murderer or the instrument of the murder that slipped into the LuthorCorp board meeting along with the throng of well-dressed business men and women. A seat remained empty, curiously avoided by everyone, a seat just opposite Lionel, on the other end of the long table. Their instincts had long been dulled by food and money and life in the city, but at the very back of their brains some tiny primal flicker of fear kept them away from that chair, away from the chair and the invisible guest in it.

While they droned on about stock holders and mergers, Lionel stared across the gleaming black table at his death.

It had the charred lips of a burnt corpse, and spoke in the voices of dying people, whispered screams of agony. Its limbs were mangled, its bones glass and steel, its blood chemical waste, its breath foulness and despair.

The other people in the room did not notice Lionel's pale face, or his hands clenching around his pen. They didn't recognize the rise of madness and horror in his eyes.

Vengeance, it said. Justice.

It had auburn hair, matted with blood, and as it crawled over the table towards Lionel, its twisted limbs got caught up in the white shroud it wore, tearing the rotted linen in places.

It smiled the smile of a friend, a lover, a child as it touched Lionel's face with loving hands.

He did not scream. His terror was mute, wedged in his throat, the fright of a child in the dark, hiding from monsters. He hurled himself at the window with the power of the truly insane, one last desperate act of violence, and fell fifty stories among a rain of shards.

They said it was suicide, but it was not.

I. London

Lex woke with his face pressed to a grimy floor. His mouth tasted of bile. His throat was raw and dry. Every fibre of his body ached and his senses were blurred beyond that, just barely able to register twilight and a rank smell of unfamiliar things. Rotting food, cigarettes and old beer, with a lingering scent of sulphur, incense and human sweat floating above it all.

Someone had thrown a blanket over him. It was some cheap polyester fabric, stiff with dirt and full of holes that had been burnt into it by cigarettes. He pushed the blanket away, overcome by sickness. After dry heaving for a few minutes, the dizziness subsided enough for Lex to take in his surroundings. He was still in the dilapidated house the mage had taken him to. Aside from the blanket, a broken faucet and empty bottles, the room was empty, the books and candles and incense gone. Had there been incense? Lex wasn't sure anymore. It seemed more likely that it had all been a dream or some kind of hallucination.

His money was gone, not that there had been left much to begin with. Three days since running from the school, which was pretty phenomenal. He had run away before, as a little kid and once from Excelsior, but it had never lasted longer than a few hours. If he remembered correctly, he hadn't come farther than London this time, but here he seemed to have slipped through the cracks. Or maybe his Dad was simply not as powerful over here, not as all seeing as he was in Metropolis. Suddenly the thought was horrible. He really didn’t know what to do in the outside world. The idea that Dad might not find him eventually had never occurred to him.

Lex shivered and drew his shirt tighter about himself. Most buttons were gone and it fell open. His chest and stomach felt bruises and itchy, but the skin showed nothing. He got lost in thought for a moment, his fingers tracing invisible lines on his skin. Lex startled out of his dazed reverie when a bug skittered along the opposite wall. Was that a cockroach? They hadn’t seemed this big in his biology books. He tossed the blanket further away. His tie and the jacket of his school uniform he had long left behind. His belt and pants, Lex discovered where undone.

He remembered only nightmarish snippets from the last three days, some parts sheer and clear and far too bright, some forever lost to darkness. Somewhat fuzzily, he recalled loitering in the late afternoon sunshine by the wrought iron gates of the school. Across the road there were apple trees, and Lex had lazily been thinking about sneaking outside and stealing one. Things had changed since Excelsior. He’d come to this school as someone having been expelled from another school and that gave him a modicum of respect. Besides, Lex was no longer trying to fit in. He had learned that lesson. Begging for scraps got you nowhere. Perhaps that was exactly what his Dad had wanted when he sent him away from Excelsior after Duncan died. What he probably hadn't wanted or expected was that Lex hadn't only stopped to value the approval of his peers, he had also pretty much stopped to value his life. If he died, so what? He had killed Duncan, he hadn't been able to save Julian. At least when he was dead, his Dad wouldn't be able to own him any longer.

Curiously, though, Lex didn't feel the usual surge of anger when he thought of his Dad. Instead there was a sneaking sense of dread, one that didn't have anything to do with future punishments. He was missing something, something that had happened somewhere during the lost time his memory refused to give him back.

So he was all lone and eyeing the apples. It was strictly forbidden to students to leave school grounds without permission, and obviously it was also forbidden to steal apples, but Lex didn't care much. None of the school’s usual punishments could compare with a single conversation with Lionel. And since Lionel had sent him to Britain, an exile that was supposed to be a punishment, Lex had felt angry and rebellious rather than scared of his father. Besides, a lecture on why Luthors did not steal apples might actually be amusing for a change.

He slipped out, ventured across the road and through the small ditch on the other side into the tree yard. He spent longer than strictly necessary wandering beneath the small old trees before he found a branch suitably heavy and hanging low with red apples and picked one, round and red and heavy in his hand. In Lex's memory, the buzzing whisper of bees was impossibly loud.

When he turned back to the road and the gate, tasting the sour sweet freshness on his lips, there was a man standing up by the road, next to a magnificent black car. The man was dressed entirely in black himself, a sleek long coat and black jeans with a black button down shirt. Only when Lex got closer he spotted the one piece of clothing that wasn't black – a pair of snake-leather shoes.

He wore sunglasses, stylishly black, and his hair, also black, was fashionably gelled back. He was not the kind of person the school liked to have hanging around by their front doors.

"How are the applesss?" the man asked. For some reason, the sibilant hiss of his voice was not funny, but he nevertheless smirked down at Lex.

Lex wasn't entirely clear on how he had ended up driving away from the school in a 1926 Bentley. All he remembered was the taste of apples in his mouth to the blaring of heavy metal music as the wind caressed his scalp. A glimpse of golden irises behind black sunglasses, the smell of sulphur and car exhausts.

Lex wished he had an apple now. He was in deep shit. Without money, he couldn't really do anything but go back and face the wrath of the school and his Dad. And scorn. This attempt to run away, Lex knew, had been a spectacular badly planned and executed disaster. He probably deserved the scorn.

He hadn't felt this bad since the meteors.

After the Bentley and the man with the sunglasses, there was a train station. Lex had a flash of vivid memory: himself in the reeking public toilets, stuffing the jacket and tie that bore the schools crest into a trashcan. This wasn’t Metropolis, where anyone would recognize him just because he was bald. In London, he could hope for anonymity. Then there had been busy streets, Indian fast food, darkness settling over London. Somehow he had found himself in a place with loud, dissonant music and dark walls, the air thick with smoke, talking to people who kept touching him – women and men both, just their fingertips, like small licks. Tasting him, although that couldn't be true. Tasting him with their fingers.

Lex closed his eyes and rubbed at his hairless arms. His skin felt unbearably grimy and dirty. This was what losing your mind had to feel like. It was like when Julian died. Lex could tell what was true and what was not anymore. He remembered buying drinks for people and being offered drinks in return. He had drunk some before, the boys at the school smuggled alcohol in all the time, particularly the upperclassmen, who could already legally purchase it. But this hadn’t been like being drunk. Everything had felt so... it had all made sense, like in a dream, but not it seemed hardly understandable. What had he talked about with these people? Who had they been, and why had they even bothered with a bald kid? And then they had gone to a quieter corner – no, someone's flat, as dark and dirty as the bar. A girl not much older than him, who had her hair dyed blonde and was dressed in a leather jacket and combat boots, had kept hugging him on a lumpy mattress on the floor, while people smoked and leafed through heavy books, old books, and some of them talked to him, asked him questions. An older woman with henna-red curly hair, round wire-rimmed glasses and soothing motherly features threw some dice on the floor, only the dice had been bones, and asked him something about them.

She had asked him to read them, but there were no letters on them. “You’re a little raw diamond, poppet,” she’d said as Lex had been hypnotized by the bone-fragments. He’d babbled drunkenly about something – a man chained to a book, or a book chained to a man, he couldn’t remember. She’d been pleased, had patted his cheek while another, tall and shrewish old woman stared over her shoulder at the bone dices and muttered curses.

He must have slept all through the next day, at least Lex could hardly remember anything except a brief moment of clarity while he sat hunched over a toilet and puked. The toilet seat had been painted in rainbow colours, probably by hand.

The next night was similar, but then the chaos mage had been there. He had come up the rickety creaking stairs, dressed in a tweed jacket and an almost respectable shirt. They had talked, but Lex didn't remember about what. Books, maybe, or money. Definitely magic. By then, Lex didn't believed in magic yet.

Now, he realized to his surprise, he definitely did. It had become darker in the empty flat where he'd woken up, the sudden darkness of storm clouds drawing together. Wind rattled the windows that had been nailed shut at some time. Lex got up and stumbled dizzily towards the stairs. He had to get out and find someone who'd let him use a phone.

The mage had taken him outside, into the night, and they had walked for a while, the man's hand heavy on Lex's shoulder, but never touching his skin like the others had.

Then they had come here. Lex recalled going up the stairs as he went down now, giddy from anonymity, stupid and reckless, scoffing at someone the mage had said.

There was a sudden thunderclap and he nearly stumbled down the last few steps. When he ventured outside it was pouring down and the sky was black with heavy clouds, cracked by violent lightning. The street was neither as run-down nor as deserted as he would have thought. There were cars parked on the sidewalks and shop windows and restaurants made for havens of light in the dreary darkness of the thunderstorm.

Beyond a vague impression of the flat lighted by candles and the mage's eyes turning inky black, Lex had no recall of the rest of the previous night. The clean air outside did nothing to clear his mind. He hugged himself tight to keep warm, but within minutes he was soaking wet. He had no idea where he was. London seemed hostile and alien. He drifted from one shop window to the next, until, all of a sudden, someone materialized out of an unwelcoming door way like out of a dusty cavern. Actually the man did not so much materialize as step out quietly and unfold a huge, musty umbrella, but to Lex, who was dazed and hungry, it felt very sudden and he startled.

"Oh dear," said the man and looked down at him. He had kind features, and a kind voice, and hair somewhere between blond and brunette with a shade of grey. He was dressed like the owner of a particularly dusty and old bookshop, but his offer to come inside was no more to be denied than the Bentley-driver's offer to hop in.

He served Lex tea and a plate of cookies amidst towers and shelves of old, leather bound books, while he kept casting worried glances at the rain outside, as if it might crawl through the nooks and crannies in the wall and invade his shop. It seemed as if something made him very nervous, but he didn't quite know what exactly it was or what to do about it. He nodded absently when Lex asked to use the phone.

The line turned out to be dead. It kept thundering.

*

A few days later, the shopkeeper sat in the backroom of his shop at a small table that had somehow been squeezed in between the mountains of old books and shared a bottle of wine with a demon. It was what they usually did after narrowly averted apocalypses and on Thursdays.

“I sort of wonder if I did the right thing, you know?” said the shopkeeper. Aziraphale was an angel, and therefore usually worried about doing the right thing, unless it came to defending his books from customers. Then the ends justified all means. “Calling those people to take care of it.”

The demon Crowley nodded absently over his glass. “Hm-hm. I wonder, too. If I did something sufficiently wrong in luring him out here. A little sorcery hardly counts as a sin.”

Aziraphale gave him a stern look. “You nearly caused... lots of terrible things. Horror. Strife. Destruction. I hear people died because of what the boy did, the poor things. Was it really necessary to start such a mess just to corrupt one soul?”

“There were apple trees!” Crowley defended himself. Nominally, he was supposed to do evil. The end of the world as humans and the heavenly hosts knew it would certainly have brought him a recommendation in hell. But he and the angel also agreed that Earth was pretty okay the way it was. “It made me nostalgic.”

“Well, I suppose it would,” Aziraphale conceded.

“So you sent the kid to those guys. Are they even on your side?”

“Are they on yours? I hear they hunt demons.”

“Huh. But they use magic, so they aren’t on yours.”

“It sort of confuses me, too,” Aziraphale admitted in a hushed voice. As an angel, he should have been very clear on these matters. “But they took care of the matter, didn’t they?”

Crowley glanced at the small window that was half-obscured by bookshelves. It was dark outside, but the night was quiet. The rain and the thunder had stopped a few hours ago, after lasting for days. “I suppose so.”