bagheera_san (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bagheera_san) wrote2007-08-22 03:44 pm
bagheera_san) wrote2007-08-22 03:44 pm
Fic: The Light and the Silence (4/?)
I completely forgot I wanted to post this before I left. But now I'm off!
Title: The Light and the Silence (4/?)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Clex, but there are other pairings, slash, het and...um... other.
Fandom: Smallville, a couple of DC characters, inspired by the Man of Steel Annual #3, an Elseworlds Superman story called "Unforgiven", of which I posted scans here.
Genre: AU, science-fiction, action/adventure
Warnings: some violence, minor character deaths
Summary:
Four
The Batman flew the Sunrider on a zigzag course through the craters and Mari of the Moon's far side to escape detection from Arkham's long range sensors. Tracking and keeping up with him proved difficult, but Ollie Queen proved to be a most capable flier and his rickety freighter was indeed a fast ship, in spite of how it looked. Then, quite unexpectedly, the Sunrider left the Moon's gravitational field and went into hyperdrive.
"We lost him," Ollie declared, throwing up his hands. "What now?"
"Dammit," Lane cursed.
"It is probably possible to calculate his trajectory," Kal-El pointed out, softly so he didn't wake Chloe, who had fallen asleep in the seat next to him. Three heads turned around to look at him expectantly.
"Well?" Lane demanded snippily when he didn't go on. "You gonna follow up on that claim, or what? Show us how smart our dear overlords really are!"
Kal squirmed in his seat. He stared past her onto the front screen that showed a multitude to tiny glittering stars. Maybe one of them was Krypton. But that wasn't where he needed to go. This had gone to far already and they couldn't possibly hope to find Mr Luthor's son like this. "I don't think we should follow him," Kal said. "We need to go back to Earth and hand ourselves in to the Council of Law. This is all a big misunderstanding – "
"Misunderstanding my ass! I got myself transferred to that hellhole as soon as I got a tip where they had taken Chloe so I could get her out of there. It took years to find her! I shot that sadistic bitch Bryce because she deserved it, and I hope that poor crazy bastard Wayne killed Kerr as well!"
"Lois," Ollie said. "Breathe. No one's going back to Earth. I know a little asteroid where we can hide a while –"
Lex walked over to Kal's seat and seized his shoulder in a firm grasp. The touch hardly fazed Kal after all the contact he had to endure in the last hours. The way Lex looked down at him and spoke in such a clear, urgent words, though, that still had the power to shake him up.
"Kal. You can't hand yourself in. They wouldn't even listen to you. You haven't dealt with matters like these before - let me handle it until we're in safety."
"There's justice for all at the Council of Law!" Kal objected hotly. He jerked at his seatbelt and got up and out of his seat.
Lex didn't stop sounding so terribly reasonable. "Justice? Have you ever heard of a single case where the accused wasn't found guilty? You're the history student, Kal-El, I'm sure you can tell me."
"I can. There's been a long history of just rulings –"
"On Earth?"
"What?"
"Have there been any since your people left Krypton?" Lex prodded. "It may be that the Council on Krypton rules justly in many cases, but was anyone ever found not guilty on Earth?"
Kal turned away from Lex's challenging gaze but the words sunk into his mind, sending ripples of sudden doubt and uncertainty through it. "… I don't think so. This is… I don't understand."
"Things have changed for your people, Kal-El. Maybe you once had a functioning legal system, but now you don't. You're despots on Earth, and you don't care one whit about justice."
"I do!" Kal exclaimed. Silence fell, sudden and complete, after his words rang out. They all stared at him, Queen surprised, Lane contemptuously and Lex looked as if he felt very sorry for Kal. Kal sucked in a harsh breath and crossed his arms, but none of it could protect him from their stares or the knowledge that there was a grain of truth in Lex's words. The treatment Chloe and the Batman had received in Arkham and the summary executions he had almost witnessed could not be just.
"Do you hate us?" he whispered, expecting the answer like a painful slap.
"We're nothing but cattle and lab rats for you," Lois Lane ground out. "Maybe you're the one good Kryptonian, kid, but the rest of you are exactly what he said: cruel despots."
"You're occupying our planet," Queen pointed out. "No one takes that lightly."
"But many of your countries were ravaged by war before we came! We cured your diseases, we cleansed Earth of all the pollution with which you had poisoned your atmosphere, we – we brought you peace and stability!"
Lex stepped in front of him, so close that Kal wished he could have escaped, but there was a wall at his back and he had to brave that penetrating gaze.
"You did all that," he nodded. "And I'm the first to admit that we weren't doing well on our own before you came. But we had the potential to solve our problems on our own. We could have grown with our tasks. Instead you took them from us. You didn't just deny us our freedom and our rights, Kal-El, you denied us our chance to become better than what we were. You took our future."
Kal sank down in his seat again, no longer trusting the floor under his feet. Reality was showing cracks and fissures, immutable truths collapsing like card houses. Why had no human ever spoken to him like this? The Kents had always seemed content, a little sad perhaps, but not this angry, not this full of resentment.
But was that really true? The Kents never spoke about life before the liberation, at least not in the presence of their masters. But what secret memories would they share in privacy? He remembered coming home as a youth once, buzzing with excitement over a history lesson – The Dark Ages of Human History and the Bright Light of Krypton – and how Jor-El had tempered his patriotism with his usual dark mood.
"It's true, Kal-El," he had said. "Earth was a dangerous place before we came. I was here before the liberation a few times, and I saw many terrible things. But it was amazing nevertheless. Who knows what they might have been if we weren't here? Do never underestimate a simple thing if it has potential for growth, son – nothing is more dangerous than that. It will surprise you one day and you will be unprepared."
And there was an even earlier memory Kal had of Mr Kent, tending the flowers in Lara's garden. Kal was just a little boy barely reaching up to his waist. "They're nice flowers," Jonathan had said in his usual gruff voice. "All pretty and clean. But when I was young… well, sometimes the nicest flowers grow on a wild meadow full of weeds."
Had he really been talking about flowers? Or had it been freedom that had made Mr Kent so wistful?
Had they hated him deep down for being a Kryptonian?
A small weight settled on his hand, and nimble fingers intertwined with his. Kal looked up, blinking to clear his suddenly blurry sight. Chloe was looking up at him. Her smile was a frail and precious thing. "You're not like the others," she said and squeezed his hand with surprising strength for such a weakened girl. "You're different."
Kal pulled his hand from her grasp and slid out of his seat. The other three watched him with apprehension on their faces, as if he might lash out any second, unarmed and alone as he was. They feared him, deep down, and that fear and resentment stood between them and Kal like an abyss. Kal wanted to be different from his people, if that were the feelings they stirred in others. But that alone was not enough to cross the chasm between them, to get on the other side and be like these humans. Instead he stood all alone now, the bridges behind him burned, the new ones not yet built.
He bent over the flight controls and stared at the ship's sensor readings. He willed the numbers to make sense, and through a veil of numbness he did the necessary calculations to determine where the hyperdrive jump had taken the Sunrider.
The destination was surprisingly mundane: an orbit of Mars, Sol's fourth planet. Kal entered the coordinates into the computer. "This is where he went," he said and turned away, walking past the seats into the back of the ship in search of a quiet place. There was a small storage space, not entirely free of light but dark enough to perform the rites of Rao.
"Thanks!" Lane called loudly after a moment of stunned silence from the humans, but Kal went down on his knees in the dark and bent his head, listening inside for guidance.
Show me the way, Light of Rao - -
In school they had learned only the second verse of the prayer, - - and tempt me not with the light of brighter stars -
But Kal prayed like his mother, the older and truer version of the guidance prayer, thinking of her solemn face in the light of a single red candle and hoping that she would forgive him –
- for I have strayed into shadows and I have followed prophets that cloak themselves into lies. Speak to me, Light of Rao, do not cast yourself in silence –
*
"Hey. This ship's got bunk beds for sleeping, you know?"
Kal blinked, and his even breathing lost its calming rhythm. It felt like emerging from a deep, dark well. He had never before meditated this long; for hours on end, ignoring hunger and exhaustion in favor of calm. Now the peace he had felt evaporated and he looked up to find Lois Lane's friend and perhaps lover standing in the door of the small storage space where Kal had taken refuge, leaning with his shoulders against the doorjamb and his hands in his pockets. Queen's blond hair was sticking up in odd places; he looked ruffled.
"I'm praying," Kal said defensively.
Ollie was surprised. "Didn't know you guys did that."
"It's an old tradition." One that most families had abandoned, and that children learned about in school as part of their history lessons. But Kal's mother still prayed every day and she had raised him to know all the prayers. Kal was not sure if he believed in them, yet they gave him comfort.
"Hey, look," Queen scratched himself behind the ear, "maybe we were all a bit harsh on you back there. Seems like you're a good guy, from what Lois told me. And the kid, Chloe, she likes you. It must've taken a lot of courage to do what you did, risking everything just to save a bunch of strangers. I'm not sure I would have done the same."
"You helped her, too," Kal said, tired and downcast.
Ollie smiled lopsidedly and shook his head. "Not the same thing. Never met a girl like Lois Lane, if you know what I mean. But I'm just a smuggler, ferrying goods for the rich, taking some for the poor – well, mostly for me. Seemed alright, before I met Lois, you know? My parents were filthy rich before the invasion, but they died in a plane crash and their company was sacked by Kryptonians. I never saw a penny of my fortune. So I'm just taking what's mine, right? But seeing what you did puts things into perspective. I almost feel like I've got something to prove."
"That you're not completely oblivious to what's going on around you?" Kal asked bitterly. "I believed we were doing the right thing all my life. I thought humanity loved us!"
Ollie shrugged. "You saw injustice and acted on it. There's no point in being to hard on yourself for being a bit slow on the uptake. Anyways, we're in orbit around Mars."
He extended a hand, and since it was covered by a green glove and Kal did not feel strong, he took it and let himself be pulled to his feet.
In the cockpit, Lex and Lois were arguing about something: she paced in what little room the ship offered and was close to yelling while he spoke softly and sat in the co-pilot's seat as if the Javelin belonged to him. Chloe was curled up in her seat and sleeping.
Looking past the arguing pair, Kal found the screen filled with a view of Mars, the red deserts and darker valleys wreathed in the faintly blue mist of a thin atmosphere. Ice caps covered the polar regions. The planet was dead, but the Science Council had plans to colonize it once the population on Earth reached critical levels.
"That's ridiculous!" Lois snapped at Lex. "'We come in peace, take us to your leader'? Ha! What are they going to say – 'oh, hi, welcome to the party, here are the coordinates of our top secret hideout?'"
Lex raised his brows, his calm only a thin veneer over biting sarcasm. "Our other options are waiting and searching a whole planet. Do these seem more appealing to you?"
"All they're going to do is blast us out of the sky!"
"Let's watch them try," Ollie interjected.
"If they do, we at least know where they are shooting from," Lex said dryly.
"Oh, by all means, try hailing them," groused Lois, giving up. "They probably won't even pick up our signal."
The verbal battle won, Lex turned to the communications controls and typed in a pretty short looking message, then sent it. They all waited in silence, even though Kal had to agree with Lois – there was no good reasons why someone who didn't want to be found should answer. It was like the game human children played; hide-and-seek.
And no one did answer them, but something happened nonetheless. Kal was the first who noticed, and his gasp alerted the others to the faint glittering in the air that suddenly dissolved into two human figures: a tall blonde girl and a short boy with sandy hair.
The girl, who had her long hair tied back in a pony-tail, wore an all-white bodysuit and had an oxygen mask hanging around her neck. The boy wore a similar getup in bright red, with an added hood and sunglasses. They had simply appeared, out of thin air, and Kal took a moment to realize that it had to be some kind of teleportation technology.
In an instant, both Lois was pointing her gun at them, and Ollie had his crossbow at the ready. "Freeze!" Lois shouted.
The girl lifted her hands, which were covered by white gloves, and smiled. "Shooting is pointless. I can teleport and Bart here moves faster than a speeding bullet. We're just here as messengers, we can go if you've changed your mind about talking. If not – I'm Alicia, this is Bart."
She looked around, seizing up each of them. Alicia didn't look threatening to Kal, and neither did the short young man who was now grinning challengingly from behind his sunglasses, at Lex in particular, as if he couldn't wait to demonstrate his amazing speed. They had to be metahumans, Kal realized, just as Alicia's eyes fell on him. They widened a little, then lingered for a moment before she glanced at Lex, then Lois, who looked extremely nervous.
"You're rebels?"
Alicia raised her brows. "Apparently? Who did you think would answer your call – little green men?" Her eyes flickered back to Lex for a second and she seemed to suppress a small grin.
"Yeah, right," Lois muttered. "We want to join your club."
"It's invitation only," the short speedster quipped, then pointed a thumb at Kal. "No aliens in the clubhouse, except the little green ones."
Alicia gave him a small glare. "Bart! I'm doing the talking."
Adjusting his shades, Bart grinned. "Right. I'm just the brawn."
She turned back to them. "What he said is true, though. We're pretty tight on security." She stressed the last word oddly. Ollie, who had lowered his crossbow, smirked as if this happened to him all the time and he couldn't really be bothered to be annoyed by it, but Lex stepped forward impatiently.
"The codeword is Ad Astra Per Aspera, and it would be wise to get out of orbit while they're not yet looking for us here."
"You're one of them!" Lois shouted. "You sneaky –"
Lex seized her up, but remained unfazed. "Very astute, Colonel Lane."
Ollie canted his head, then shrugged and pointed his crossbow at Lex.
"Faster than a bullet, man," Bart piped up. "That means faster than whatever you shoot, too."
"Oh, it's nothing personal, I just feel safer with a weapon between me and an slick lying snake like him," Ollie threw back.
"You wanted to go to the rebels, now you're there," Lex said. "I see no reason to complain."
"You suggested we go here!" Lois shouted. "You manipulated us from the start. What about your frill-head, then, is he in on it - ?"
He caught Lex's eyes across the room, and Kal wondered where the stab of betrayal came from as he looked helplessly into their cool, impenetrable grey. One of the rebels.
"I didn't," he said softly.
"Look," Alicia said, "we're the good guys. There's no need to panic."
"You might be the good guys, but you've got no problems with blowing up buildings or killing people when your good fight demands it. Excuse me if I'm less than willing to lay my life in your hands," Lois snarled back.
Kal thought of the images he had seen of rebel bombings and terrorist attacks. Of a burning hospital he had seen on the news, and a crashed transport ship going to Arkham, bodies being carried off in big containers. He thought of the Batman, crouching in his cell, every inch of his skin scarred and abused and his human eye crying murder. He remembered the sensation of warm blood spattering his legs, felt even through the bodysuit, as Lois Lane killed Dr Bryce. He looked at Chloe, awake but still huddled in her seat as if trying to vanish, staring with wide eyes at the weapons and the argument.
The rebels were undeniably cruel and dangerous, but so were Kal's people. What was worse: ten people killed in a fire, or ten-thousand suffering in Arkham? Could they do anything worse to him than what had been done to Batman?
He raised his hands. "I surrender."
All eyes in the ship were on him immediately. The intense scrutiny from all sides made Kal want to squirm, but he braved it with his head held high. What did he have to fear or be ashamed of after all? He had abandoned his family, his home, his people, and stood among people who knew exactly what guilt he carried.
Lex was first to recover from his surprise, and he slunk past Alicia and Ollie's threatening crossbow as if they were but little figures on a game board, and he and Kal the only players. Then his hand was on Kal's arm, a firm warm clasp and he was staring straight into Kal's eyes. "You won't regret it," he promised. "I personally guarantee your safety, Kal-El."
Title: The Light and the Silence (4/?)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Clex, but there are other pairings, slash, het and...um... other.
Fandom: Smallville, a couple of DC characters, inspired by the Man of Steel Annual #3, an Elseworlds Superman story called "Unforgiven", of which I posted scans here.
Genre: AU, science-fiction, action/adventure
Warnings: some violence, minor character deaths
Summary:
Four
The Batman flew the Sunrider on a zigzag course through the craters and Mari of the Moon's far side to escape detection from Arkham's long range sensors. Tracking and keeping up with him proved difficult, but Ollie Queen proved to be a most capable flier and his rickety freighter was indeed a fast ship, in spite of how it looked. Then, quite unexpectedly, the Sunrider left the Moon's gravitational field and went into hyperdrive.
"We lost him," Ollie declared, throwing up his hands. "What now?"
"Dammit," Lane cursed.
"It is probably possible to calculate his trajectory," Kal-El pointed out, softly so he didn't wake Chloe, who had fallen asleep in the seat next to him. Three heads turned around to look at him expectantly.
"Well?" Lane demanded snippily when he didn't go on. "You gonna follow up on that claim, or what? Show us how smart our dear overlords really are!"
Kal squirmed in his seat. He stared past her onto the front screen that showed a multitude to tiny glittering stars. Maybe one of them was Krypton. But that wasn't where he needed to go. This had gone to far already and they couldn't possibly hope to find Mr Luthor's son like this. "I don't think we should follow him," Kal said. "We need to go back to Earth and hand ourselves in to the Council of Law. This is all a big misunderstanding – "
"Misunderstanding my ass! I got myself transferred to that hellhole as soon as I got a tip where they had taken Chloe so I could get her out of there. It took years to find her! I shot that sadistic bitch Bryce because she deserved it, and I hope that poor crazy bastard Wayne killed Kerr as well!"
"Lois," Ollie said. "Breathe. No one's going back to Earth. I know a little asteroid where we can hide a while –"
Lex walked over to Kal's seat and seized his shoulder in a firm grasp. The touch hardly fazed Kal after all the contact he had to endure in the last hours. The way Lex looked down at him and spoke in such a clear, urgent words, though, that still had the power to shake him up.
"Kal. You can't hand yourself in. They wouldn't even listen to you. You haven't dealt with matters like these before - let me handle it until we're in safety."
"There's justice for all at the Council of Law!" Kal objected hotly. He jerked at his seatbelt and got up and out of his seat.
Lex didn't stop sounding so terribly reasonable. "Justice? Have you ever heard of a single case where the accused wasn't found guilty? You're the history student, Kal-El, I'm sure you can tell me."
"I can. There's been a long history of just rulings –"
"On Earth?"
"What?"
"Have there been any since your people left Krypton?" Lex prodded. "It may be that the Council on Krypton rules justly in many cases, but was anyone ever found not guilty on Earth?"
Kal turned away from Lex's challenging gaze but the words sunk into his mind, sending ripples of sudden doubt and uncertainty through it. "… I don't think so. This is… I don't understand."
"Things have changed for your people, Kal-El. Maybe you once had a functioning legal system, but now you don't. You're despots on Earth, and you don't care one whit about justice."
"I do!" Kal exclaimed. Silence fell, sudden and complete, after his words rang out. They all stared at him, Queen surprised, Lane contemptuously and Lex looked as if he felt very sorry for Kal. Kal sucked in a harsh breath and crossed his arms, but none of it could protect him from their stares or the knowledge that there was a grain of truth in Lex's words. The treatment Chloe and the Batman had received in Arkham and the summary executions he had almost witnessed could not be just.
"Do you hate us?" he whispered, expecting the answer like a painful slap.
"We're nothing but cattle and lab rats for you," Lois Lane ground out. "Maybe you're the one good Kryptonian, kid, but the rest of you are exactly what he said: cruel despots."
"You're occupying our planet," Queen pointed out. "No one takes that lightly."
"But many of your countries were ravaged by war before we came! We cured your diseases, we cleansed Earth of all the pollution with which you had poisoned your atmosphere, we – we brought you peace and stability!"
Lex stepped in front of him, so close that Kal wished he could have escaped, but there was a wall at his back and he had to brave that penetrating gaze.
"You did all that," he nodded. "And I'm the first to admit that we weren't doing well on our own before you came. But we had the potential to solve our problems on our own. We could have grown with our tasks. Instead you took them from us. You didn't just deny us our freedom and our rights, Kal-El, you denied us our chance to become better than what we were. You took our future."
Kal sank down in his seat again, no longer trusting the floor under his feet. Reality was showing cracks and fissures, immutable truths collapsing like card houses. Why had no human ever spoken to him like this? The Kents had always seemed content, a little sad perhaps, but not this angry, not this full of resentment.
But was that really true? The Kents never spoke about life before the liberation, at least not in the presence of their masters. But what secret memories would they share in privacy? He remembered coming home as a youth once, buzzing with excitement over a history lesson – The Dark Ages of Human History and the Bright Light of Krypton – and how Jor-El had tempered his patriotism with his usual dark mood.
"It's true, Kal-El," he had said. "Earth was a dangerous place before we came. I was here before the liberation a few times, and I saw many terrible things. But it was amazing nevertheless. Who knows what they might have been if we weren't here? Do never underestimate a simple thing if it has potential for growth, son – nothing is more dangerous than that. It will surprise you one day and you will be unprepared."
And there was an even earlier memory Kal had of Mr Kent, tending the flowers in Lara's garden. Kal was just a little boy barely reaching up to his waist. "They're nice flowers," Jonathan had said in his usual gruff voice. "All pretty and clean. But when I was young… well, sometimes the nicest flowers grow on a wild meadow full of weeds."
Had he really been talking about flowers? Or had it been freedom that had made Mr Kent so wistful?
Had they hated him deep down for being a Kryptonian?
A small weight settled on his hand, and nimble fingers intertwined with his. Kal looked up, blinking to clear his suddenly blurry sight. Chloe was looking up at him. Her smile was a frail and precious thing. "You're not like the others," she said and squeezed his hand with surprising strength for such a weakened girl. "You're different."
Kal pulled his hand from her grasp and slid out of his seat. The other three watched him with apprehension on their faces, as if he might lash out any second, unarmed and alone as he was. They feared him, deep down, and that fear and resentment stood between them and Kal like an abyss. Kal wanted to be different from his people, if that were the feelings they stirred in others. But that alone was not enough to cross the chasm between them, to get on the other side and be like these humans. Instead he stood all alone now, the bridges behind him burned, the new ones not yet built.
He bent over the flight controls and stared at the ship's sensor readings. He willed the numbers to make sense, and through a veil of numbness he did the necessary calculations to determine where the hyperdrive jump had taken the Sunrider.
The destination was surprisingly mundane: an orbit of Mars, Sol's fourth planet. Kal entered the coordinates into the computer. "This is where he went," he said and turned away, walking past the seats into the back of the ship in search of a quiet place. There was a small storage space, not entirely free of light but dark enough to perform the rites of Rao.
"Thanks!" Lane called loudly after a moment of stunned silence from the humans, but Kal went down on his knees in the dark and bent his head, listening inside for guidance.
Show me the way, Light of Rao - -
In school they had learned only the second verse of the prayer, - - and tempt me not with the light of brighter stars -
But Kal prayed like his mother, the older and truer version of the guidance prayer, thinking of her solemn face in the light of a single red candle and hoping that she would forgive him –
- for I have strayed into shadows and I have followed prophets that cloak themselves into lies. Speak to me, Light of Rao, do not cast yourself in silence –
*
"Hey. This ship's got bunk beds for sleeping, you know?"
Kal blinked, and his even breathing lost its calming rhythm. It felt like emerging from a deep, dark well. He had never before meditated this long; for hours on end, ignoring hunger and exhaustion in favor of calm. Now the peace he had felt evaporated and he looked up to find Lois Lane's friend and perhaps lover standing in the door of the small storage space where Kal had taken refuge, leaning with his shoulders against the doorjamb and his hands in his pockets. Queen's blond hair was sticking up in odd places; he looked ruffled.
"I'm praying," Kal said defensively.
Ollie was surprised. "Didn't know you guys did that."
"It's an old tradition." One that most families had abandoned, and that children learned about in school as part of their history lessons. But Kal's mother still prayed every day and she had raised him to know all the prayers. Kal was not sure if he believed in them, yet they gave him comfort.
"Hey, look," Queen scratched himself behind the ear, "maybe we were all a bit harsh on you back there. Seems like you're a good guy, from what Lois told me. And the kid, Chloe, she likes you. It must've taken a lot of courage to do what you did, risking everything just to save a bunch of strangers. I'm not sure I would have done the same."
"You helped her, too," Kal said, tired and downcast.
Ollie smiled lopsidedly and shook his head. "Not the same thing. Never met a girl like Lois Lane, if you know what I mean. But I'm just a smuggler, ferrying goods for the rich, taking some for the poor – well, mostly for me. Seemed alright, before I met Lois, you know? My parents were filthy rich before the invasion, but they died in a plane crash and their company was sacked by Kryptonians. I never saw a penny of my fortune. So I'm just taking what's mine, right? But seeing what you did puts things into perspective. I almost feel like I've got something to prove."
"That you're not completely oblivious to what's going on around you?" Kal asked bitterly. "I believed we were doing the right thing all my life. I thought humanity loved us!"
Ollie shrugged. "You saw injustice and acted on it. There's no point in being to hard on yourself for being a bit slow on the uptake. Anyways, we're in orbit around Mars."
He extended a hand, and since it was covered by a green glove and Kal did not feel strong, he took it and let himself be pulled to his feet.
In the cockpit, Lex and Lois were arguing about something: she paced in what little room the ship offered and was close to yelling while he spoke softly and sat in the co-pilot's seat as if the Javelin belonged to him. Chloe was curled up in her seat and sleeping.
Looking past the arguing pair, Kal found the screen filled with a view of Mars, the red deserts and darker valleys wreathed in the faintly blue mist of a thin atmosphere. Ice caps covered the polar regions. The planet was dead, but the Science Council had plans to colonize it once the population on Earth reached critical levels.
"That's ridiculous!" Lois snapped at Lex. "'We come in peace, take us to your leader'? Ha! What are they going to say – 'oh, hi, welcome to the party, here are the coordinates of our top secret hideout?'"
Lex raised his brows, his calm only a thin veneer over biting sarcasm. "Our other options are waiting and searching a whole planet. Do these seem more appealing to you?"
"All they're going to do is blast us out of the sky!"
"Let's watch them try," Ollie interjected.
"If they do, we at least know where they are shooting from," Lex said dryly.
"Oh, by all means, try hailing them," groused Lois, giving up. "They probably won't even pick up our signal."
The verbal battle won, Lex turned to the communications controls and typed in a pretty short looking message, then sent it. They all waited in silence, even though Kal had to agree with Lois – there was no good reasons why someone who didn't want to be found should answer. It was like the game human children played; hide-and-seek.
And no one did answer them, but something happened nonetheless. Kal was the first who noticed, and his gasp alerted the others to the faint glittering in the air that suddenly dissolved into two human figures: a tall blonde girl and a short boy with sandy hair.
The girl, who had her long hair tied back in a pony-tail, wore an all-white bodysuit and had an oxygen mask hanging around her neck. The boy wore a similar getup in bright red, with an added hood and sunglasses. They had simply appeared, out of thin air, and Kal took a moment to realize that it had to be some kind of teleportation technology.
In an instant, both Lois was pointing her gun at them, and Ollie had his crossbow at the ready. "Freeze!" Lois shouted.
The girl lifted her hands, which were covered by white gloves, and smiled. "Shooting is pointless. I can teleport and Bart here moves faster than a speeding bullet. We're just here as messengers, we can go if you've changed your mind about talking. If not – I'm Alicia, this is Bart."
She looked around, seizing up each of them. Alicia didn't look threatening to Kal, and neither did the short young man who was now grinning challengingly from behind his sunglasses, at Lex in particular, as if he couldn't wait to demonstrate his amazing speed. They had to be metahumans, Kal realized, just as Alicia's eyes fell on him. They widened a little, then lingered for a moment before she glanced at Lex, then Lois, who looked extremely nervous.
"You're rebels?"
Alicia raised her brows. "Apparently? Who did you think would answer your call – little green men?" Her eyes flickered back to Lex for a second and she seemed to suppress a small grin.
"Yeah, right," Lois muttered. "We want to join your club."
"It's invitation only," the short speedster quipped, then pointed a thumb at Kal. "No aliens in the clubhouse, except the little green ones."
Alicia gave him a small glare. "Bart! I'm doing the talking."
Adjusting his shades, Bart grinned. "Right. I'm just the brawn."
She turned back to them. "What he said is true, though. We're pretty tight on security." She stressed the last word oddly. Ollie, who had lowered his crossbow, smirked as if this happened to him all the time and he couldn't really be bothered to be annoyed by it, but Lex stepped forward impatiently.
"The codeword is Ad Astra Per Aspera, and it would be wise to get out of orbit while they're not yet looking for us here."
"You're one of them!" Lois shouted. "You sneaky –"
Lex seized her up, but remained unfazed. "Very astute, Colonel Lane."
Ollie canted his head, then shrugged and pointed his crossbow at Lex.
"Faster than a bullet, man," Bart piped up. "That means faster than whatever you shoot, too."
"Oh, it's nothing personal, I just feel safer with a weapon between me and an slick lying snake like him," Ollie threw back.
"You wanted to go to the rebels, now you're there," Lex said. "I see no reason to complain."
"You suggested we go here!" Lois shouted. "You manipulated us from the start. What about your frill-head, then, is he in on it - ?"
He caught Lex's eyes across the room, and Kal wondered where the stab of betrayal came from as he looked helplessly into their cool, impenetrable grey. One of the rebels.
"I didn't," he said softly.
"Look," Alicia said, "we're the good guys. There's no need to panic."
"You might be the good guys, but you've got no problems with blowing up buildings or killing people when your good fight demands it. Excuse me if I'm less than willing to lay my life in your hands," Lois snarled back.
Kal thought of the images he had seen of rebel bombings and terrorist attacks. Of a burning hospital he had seen on the news, and a crashed transport ship going to Arkham, bodies being carried off in big containers. He thought of the Batman, crouching in his cell, every inch of his skin scarred and abused and his human eye crying murder. He remembered the sensation of warm blood spattering his legs, felt even through the bodysuit, as Lois Lane killed Dr Bryce. He looked at Chloe, awake but still huddled in her seat as if trying to vanish, staring with wide eyes at the weapons and the argument.
The rebels were undeniably cruel and dangerous, but so were Kal's people. What was worse: ten people killed in a fire, or ten-thousand suffering in Arkham? Could they do anything worse to him than what had been done to Batman?
He raised his hands. "I surrender."
All eyes in the ship were on him immediately. The intense scrutiny from all sides made Kal want to squirm, but he braved it with his head held high. What did he have to fear or be ashamed of after all? He had abandoned his family, his home, his people, and stood among people who knew exactly what guilt he carried.
Lex was first to recover from his surprise, and he slunk past Alicia and Ollie's threatening crossbow as if they were but little figures on a game board, and he and Kal the only players. Then his hand was on Kal's arm, a firm warm clasp and he was staring straight into Kal's eyes. "You won't regret it," he promised. "I personally guarantee your safety, Kal-El."