Fic: The Light and the Silence (5/?)
Sep. 5th, 2007 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bagheera_sanThis chapter is where my mission to incorporate not only every minor SV character ever, but also tons of Bat-characters, becomes really obvious. And also: finally some answers!
Title: The Light and the Silence (5/?)
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:
Five
It soon became clear to Kal that Lex was far more than just 'one of them'. He ordered Bart to stay behind with the humans on the ship, and told Alicia to take him and Kal to the rebel hideout immediately. She stepped closer to them, put a hand each on one of their shoulders and gave Kal a tiny encouraging smile before teleporting. The sensation was odd, like bathing in one of the sweet fizzy soda drinks humans loved to drink.
It prickled oddly, and then his body flowed back together in a dark place. It was a cavern, the ground rust-red and dusty, and the ceiling vanishing in darkness high above them. Jagged rock formations hung down from the ceiling like the teeth of a dragon, and there was a rustling of shadows everywhere, people hidden in the darkness. In the dim light of electric lanterns, Alicia with her white clothes and fair hair seemed to glow, and Lex appeared pale as a paper moon. To their right, a yawning abyss cut into the cave and there was a flight of stairs carved straight from the red rock going down without a visible end.
Lex took a deep breath next to Kal. He fingered his collar. "It's time to take this off," he said.
Keeping his eyes on his hands, unable to look at Lex, Kal took off one glove and pressed his thumb to the collar. With his index finger, he could feel a quick, hot pulse beating right under the smooth skin, and then the collar melted from its unbreakable crystalline form back into a soft band and slid off Lex's neck.
"Got him well trained," Alicia commented, and Kal took a quick step back, flushing at her wicked little grin.
"Bruce?" Lex asked, ignoring her teasing.
"Down in the solarium. Alfred's trying to patch him up and feed him, and Vic is ranting at him about our lack of supplies. Lucius and Hamilton are probably still arguing whether the implants are salvageable." Alicia hesitated, and brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear. "He's worse than usual, Lex. He keeps playing with that silver thing – he's out of his mind."
"When hasn't he been?"
Lex took the collar from Kal and put it back into his belt, then led the way down the carved stairs. Kal blinked and tried to feel his way in the dark, afraid of tripping and falling into the bottomless chasm. A cold, dry draft came up from the hidden depths. Then suddenly, there were no more steps, just flat ground that seemed smoother somehow than the stairs, and above and around them, an archway, tall enough for giants, lit up. The rounded arch narrowed to a pointy tip at the top, like a lancet, and seemed to be made all of one slab of black, glittering stone. There were tiny, glowing glyphs all over, like blue veins of light, but they were neither written in Kryptonian nor any in Earth language. Behind it, the room was no longer a cavern, but clearly artificially made, and as Alicia and Kal followed Lex through the arch, the glyphs lit up more brightly, showing other doors further down and corridors branching off into other directions. There was no artificial light in the dim corridors apart from the glowing glyphs that adorned the wall every few feet.
As they walked further, Kal noticed that the walls were in many places covered in delicate mosaics made from orange and red stones, and some of them showed what looked like plants and mountains; others appeared to be star constellations, and again others showed all kinds of creatures, one kind in particular that was always depicted with shimmering green stones and looked much like an upright lizard or insect.
"Was this made by humans?" he asked in wonder. He knew that humans had produced countless artifacts without purpose – they called it "art", a primitive tradition that was slowly dying out under the influence of progressive Kryptonian civilization. But the rebels could hardly have found the time or resources to do so, could they?
"We found it like this when we first arrived," Lex said, but he did not stop to admire the mosaics, instead heading deeper and deeper into the structure. It was not at all like Arkham, no horrible smells or noises greeted them, just solemn silence and dry air.
Alicia trailed the tips of her gloved fingers over the mosaics as they walked past and smiled. "They're beautiful, aren't they?"
"Do they … do anything?" Kal asked, feeling rather stupid.
"I think it tells a story. About the people who made it, their lives, their hopes, their dreams – "
Further ahead, Lex had reached the end of the corridor. There was another archway, this one smaller, and the room beyond it was filled with a gloomy rust-colored glow, as if the red rocks themselves were emitting a soft light. Two men were arguing loudly. Their voices bounced off the walls, echoing and rippling like small waves on a pond. Kal and Alicia reached the arch. Stair went down from there to the centre of the room, which turned out to be an almost perfect sphere, large enough to contain a small house. The sphere was broken only by the arch and a circular hole at the very top through which sunlight flooded in through a long shaft about twenty feet in diameter. The sun had to be standing almost directly above it, otherwise the room would have been dark. As it was, the light hit the small space glider Kal and Lex had bought on Earth, which was suspended on steel chords from what looked like a rather makeshift metal scaffold. Reflected by the Sunrider's golden hull, the sunlight was warm and bright. Kal wondered what the purpose of the room had once been – perhaps it was a former well, but that did not explain why the red stone walls were polished almost to perfect smoothness, and inlaid with small pieces of yellow stone or glass that looked a bit like star constellations.
Beneath the suspended glider, the scaffold went on, broadening into a larger platform which presently housed a large, silver chair with black cushions. A man lay sprawled in it, one-armed, dark-haired, his large body wiry and emaciated, but clean. Next to the chair stood a tall, thin man, neatly dressed for the rebels' standards, with a pencil mustache and an aloof expression. He was dabbing a few cuts and bruises the prone man sported, while at the same time carrying a tray with a bowl and several sandwiches.
The man in the chair, Kal now realized, was Bruce Wayne, the Batman, leader of the rebels. The robotic arm he had worn in Arkham had been removed. Two middle-aged black men were arguing over it. They had it partly dismantled on a table before them, and the one in the smudged lab-coat and the goggles was angrily waving a screwdriver-like object. He was gaunt, and somewhat stooped, as if he was used to scurrying in dark places, and he was twitchy and nervous. The somewhat older man he was arguing with, whose hair was peppered with grey and white, appeared much calmer. There were two other people in the room: a young man whose body was partly replaced by the same kind of robotic implants Wayne wore, the cool metal contrasting sharply with his cocoa-colored skin and who stood with his arms crossed next to the Batman's chair, talking softly to him and sometimes glaring at the two arguing scientists. The sixth person was the last Kal spotted: a limber young man with dark hair, a healthy tan and a merry grin, climbing around on the glider as nimbly as a monkey. He was the first to notice Lex walking down the stairs, and he flipped backwards off the glider. Kal gaped in astonishment as the young man hurtled through the air like a fish in the water and landed softly on his feet right in front of them.
"Lex!" he exclaimed. "Holy Martian canals, Bruce and you on the same day! It's like Christmas and Invasion Day all at once!" The man with the goggles glared at the youth, while the older scientist smiled affectionately.
"Assuming that I'm Christmas, nice to see you too, Dick," Lex greeted him, and Kal saw the flash of a smile as he tilted his face at Dick. He wanted to follow him into the cavern, but as he started forward, Alicia seized his hand and held him back with a shake of her head.
"Let him do the talking," she whispered. "He could talk Bruce out of sleeping with a batarang under his pillow if he wanted to."
"Lex," the older scientist greeted with a nod, and Lex returned the nod with a polite, "Mr Fox, Dr Hamilton," then turned towards the young cyborg and said, "Hello Vic. The place looks fine, better than when I last saw it. You've worked wonders."
"You've been away a long time," the cyborg replied in a rather reserved tone.
Wayne had sat up on his single elbow, his stump pressed against his side, eyeing Lex with one blue and one mechanical eye, but the man with the tray continued dabbing his wounds. "Welcome back, Master Lex. Would you like a sandwich?" His voice was prim and oddly accented, as if he had never even heard of standardization reforms.
"No thanks, Alfred. And please, don't call me master. I get called that enough on Earth. England's an awfully long way from here."
"Distance makes the heart grow fonder," the man called Alfred replied calmly, and to Batman added, "Master Bruce, please do be sensible and eat. You are but skin and bones."
Dick crouched beside the chair. He spoke softly, but Kal could still hear a tone of worry and affection. "Yeah, Bruce. You don't look so hot."
Bruce Wayne ignored him and sat fully up. His one hand he kept clenched in a fist. His alert eyes flickered from Lex to Kal. He felt Alicia's hand drop out of his as they fell under scrutiny and to his surprise he missed the touch, felt more vulnerable without it.
"The Kryptonian," Wayne rasped. "Why is he still running free?"
"A change of plan," Lex replied.
"You're not the one to change plans around here, Lex."
"Am I not?" Lex asked. "I was under impression that this was a joint venture."
"On Earth you might have influence," Victor injected, "but here you're just your father's errand boy, Luthor."
Kal sucked in a startled breath and nearly choked on it. Luthor. Lex was Lionel Luthor's son. Lex Luthor. Alexander Luthor. He had let himself be lulled in by the human's sly talk about the meaning of names, when it was so obvious. Alexander Luthor hadn't been kidnapped by rebels. He was a rebel, and more than ten years older than the little boy in the photograph.
Kal had been lied to and betrayed from the very first moment. But why? Why did they do that? A change of plan, Lex had said. What plan? Was it all a scheme to lure him here? He was just the son of a minor house, no one would pay a ransom for him –
"I'm not going to go into the fact that I am a metahuman," Lex looked from Victor to Bruce Wayne. "Certain parts of our organization, I am sure, have noticed that as well. And metas are the backbone of this enterprise."
"Humans are," Wayne growled.
Lex circled the chair, keeping all eyes on him, and glanced around, from one to the other, at each of them, clearly challenging. "That sounds very nice, but I can't help noticing that you surround yourself with people who don't have an active metagene. None of your closest supporters are metahumans, Bruce. And I know what you think about us. We're unstable. Dangerous. Our powers make us arrogant. You prefer technology, because he can control it, micromanage it down to last bit. Given the choice you'd rather trust a monster you created yourself."
"What do you want, Lex?" The Batman looked angry, driven into a corner, and Kal thought it was a rather foolish thing to try and corner this man.
But Lex seemed unconcerned. He put a hand onto the armrest of the chair and leaned close, nearly speaking into Wayne's ear. "I admit that a dead Kryptonian could have been useful, if that was the only thing we could get. But imagine having a live Kryptonian in our ranks. A real one, fighting for our cause. I want him, Bruce. He's different. Question the people who came with us, if you don't believe me. You know what he could do, once he sheds his limitations."
"That's exactly why I don't want it! He's dangerous enough as it is."
"And Project Doomsday won't be dangerous?"
The calmer of the two scientists, Mr Fox, injected, "He's right about that. You know my reservations regarding Project Doomsday."
"Reservations!" Dr Hamilton scoffed. "Reservations won't get us anywhere. Science isn't for cowards – of course an bureaucrat like you wouldn't understand." He eyed Kal with glittering, nervous eyes. "Look at it. It's what we need to complete Doomsday."
Lex ignored Hamilton. "Think about it, Bruce. Dead, he can be harvested for weapons, but alive, he can be victory."
Kal took a horrified step back at Lex's hissed words, terror seizing him, making him sick. These beautiful caverns housed the same terror as Arkham. Once again, Alicia grabbed his wrist and forced him to stay, to listen.
"You're going to fight me for him," Wayne stated with narrowed eyes. Lex nodded solemnly. Wayne frowned. "I want contingency measures."
Grim but smiling, Lex reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small leaden case. "Lady Jan assured me that this should take care of any Kryptonian."
Batman stared at the case without taking it. Lex's face softened somewhat, and he sighed. "It's a ring, Bruce, not a bullet."
Wayne took the case then, and as he opened his hand there was a glint of silver. Quick as a striking snake, Lex seized his wrist and tried to pry the silver object from him, but Kal had barely seen the small round disk when Wayne snatched it away again. It had looked rusty, but silver rusted black, not red, so maybe there was a stain of blood on it.
"You met Harvey on the way out," Lex said flatly. Everyone had been listening to them with bated breath, but at this the silence turned leaden and heavy.
"I took the coin," Wayne said, and Kal remembered Harvey Dent of Arkham, who had also had a small silver disk like this one. He did not understand, only that something terrible hung like a storm over their conversation.
"Did you kill him?"
Wayne clenched his fingers to fist around the coin, his knuckles and the lines of his scars stark white, and pressed it against his bare chest. "I set him free."
Lex remained where he stood for a moment, straight-backed and still confrontational, but then, without moving very much at all, he seemed to open-up to the man in the chair. He put a hand on his shoulder and looked him straight in the face as he said something too soft for anyone else to hear. For a short moment, he seemed to wait for an answer or search for a reaction, but Wayne's face changed no more than a photograph. Lex stepped back again.
"This is settled, then," he said, clearly intended for everyone in the room. "Project Doomsday is on ice. I'll," he turned around to look up at Kal and Alicia, "take care of our guest."
Neither Batman nor any of the other humans objected, although Dr Hamilton looked angry and Mr Fox rather relieved. Kal had the distinct feeling that Lex had won a verbal battle – maybe by having the stronger position, but maybe just by steering the argument towards Batman's weakest points. He wondered what the story between Lex and Bruce Wayne was, and how Harvey Dent figured into it.
They left the spherical room and returned to the dim corridor that had led them there. Waves of tension still radiated off Lex as he strode away, but Alicia gave Kal a small grin as they hurried after him. "Good thing Lex likes you," she whispered. "It would have been a shame if Hamilton had turned you into one of his Frankenstein experiments."
Kal didn't know what Frankenstein was, but he had a good enough idea. The other thing, though – "He likes me?"
"Sure he does. If Lex doesn't treat you like a servant or piece of furniture, it means he either likes you or hates you."
"Alicia, would you go an see how Bart is holding up?" Lex said calmly, without bothering to turn around or stop. Alicia rolled her eyes.
"Case in point," she shrugged and dissolved into nothing. Suddenly Kal was alone with Lex. He had a hard time ordering his racing thoughts, and felt like he had already forgotten a million important things that had been said back in there, but one thing still stood out.
"You're Alexander Luthor. You're the boy we were looking for."
"Yes. I would prefer to explain things to you in private and in a more comfortable setting, though." At this, Lex turned sharply left, into a corridor branching off the main one. It quickly narrowed into a steep flight of stairs. There were no light sources apart from a dim glow up ahead that they climbed towards, and Kal had to try too hard not to loose his footing to argue with Lex. After a seemingly endless climb, the glow grew brighter and they reached the top. It came from a circular window on top of a stone door. Lex hesitated a moment, then touched the dusty red stone with his index finger and started drawing lines and squiggles. They lit up in the wake of his finger, glittering letters of an alien alphabet. When he was finished, the door slid open with a grinding groan.
The room beyond was about three or four times the size of Kal's old room at home, rectangular, far longer than it was wide and with a higher ceiling than the corridors. The door through which they had entered was situated on the long side of the rectangle, and the long wall opposite them appeared to be made of black crystal or glass, opaque except for a thin space on top through which light flooded into the room. Beyond that wall the surface of Mars had to lie. For the most part, the room was bare stone – bare walls, bare floor, bare ceiling, but there were a few pieces of furniture that looked distinctly human: a desk, several cabinets, a closet and a bed – one of those strange human contraptions that were all soft cushions and blankets and wide enough for two. Its mere presence made Kal uncomfortably aware of certain things about which he had always wondered, and he turned away to face the desk and the cabinets. There were two chairs, not very comfortable looking, and Lex pulled out one of them and offered it to Kal, who sat down but then regretted it when Lex remained standing, leaning with his hip against the desk and looking down at Kal with an odd expression: partly thoughtful, partly satisfied, and all in all rather proprietary.
"I am Alexander Luthor," he began after a moment, "but I would still prefer if you called me Lex. As you've probably guessed, my father is part of this organization. We had heard rumors that a young Kryptonian was looking for dangerous and well-paying work, and since our scientists up here have been wanting a complete specimen of a Kryptonian – alive or dead – for a while, I suggested hiring you. Sending you on a bounty hunt took care of two problems: how to get you to trust me enough to disarm you, and how to get a Kryptonian body and an illegal metahuman out of Earth and to Mars. At least that was the plan as my father conceived it."
Having grown up with the Kents as his caretakers, Kal had never entirely been able to believe in the commonly held opinion that humans in their natural state were a brutal, compassionless and cunning people. But now, as this plan was revealed to him, he couldn't doubt it. The same tight coil of discomfort and horror he had felt at his own people not long before returned, now directed at the people he thought were the victims.
But then again, they weren't doing it senselessly, as Kal's people did, weren't they? They had a reason to be so ruthless.
"Why didn't you do it that way?" he asked Lex. Kal didn't doubt that Lex could have disarmed or even killed him any time without taking them to Arkham first.
"I never intended to follow my Dad's plan," Lex replied, giving him a slight shrug. "Going to Arkham was as much a priority as bringing you to Mars."
"Because of… Bruce Wayne? You were going to break him out?"
"That would have depended entirely on the situation. In a worst case scenario, I would have tried to kill him."
Kal recoiled – the two men had argued in front of him, but he could not believe that they wanted each other dead. Lex was watching him carefully.
"Remember what Colonel Lane told us," he reminded Kal. "Only two kinds of people leave Arkham: dead men and the Batman. He hadn't broken out on his own in nearly two years, so I had to consider it at least a possibility that they had broken him beyond repair. Then killing him would have been… the only respectful thing to do. Dad would have considered that an unnecessary risk, of course."
"We would never have made it out without Colonel Lane and her friend," Kal said as he realized that Lex had actually been planning on fighting out their way alone.
But Lex gave him a superior smirk. "That's why Colonel Lane was there, Kal. I gave her an anonymous tip. She was searching for her cousin for years, and due to her position in the military, it was a good bet that she could get into Arkham and would try to free her if given the chance."
"That's –" Kal stared at him open-mouthed.
"A number of people have assured me that under different circumstances, I'd be a criminal mastermind," Lex said, and a grin broke through his serious expression. "And my Dad calls me a reckless irresponsible dreamer."
Kal blinked at the words – he knew them well, his own father had often complained about the same flaws in him. He imagined Lionel Luthor's wrath to be a lot less pleasant that Jor-El's tired admonishments, though.
"Why was it so important to you to get Wayne out of Arkham?"
Lex's attention seemed to turn inside. He glanced away, into the distance, and remained silent for quite some time. Then he turned around, still perching on the desk, and picked up a stack of old folders. From underneath them, he pulled out a picture frame. He gazed at it for almost a minute before giving it to Kal.
It was a big photograph with many people in it. The scene was unfamiliar, it had most likely been taken before the liberation – the invasion, Kal reminded himself. There were only humans in it, the men wearing dark suits and the woman in dresses that left little to the imagination, their hair styled perfectly. This was how the rich and powerful had once looked on Earth. Many of them held thin glasses in their hands, and in the background, Kal spotted wood-paneled walls and stained glass windows.
"Who are these people?"
Lex took tilted the picture so he could see it as well. He didn't answer directly. "I first met Bruce as a boy. He and I might have gone to the same boarding school if the invasion hadn't happened. Both our parents were rich and his parents knew mine. But we didn't meet at school. We met in a hospital – a research facility. You see, our parents were the forerunners of the rebels you've met today."
"But this was before the invasion," Kal objected. "How could they have known - ?"
"They knew. One of your people had warned them, a sympathizer with humans, or some kind of rebel, who knows what his true motivation was. They had no official name for themselves… you could probably call them a conspiracy. Businessmen, high-ranking military, scientists, even royalty, if I'm not mistaken." He pointed at a man in a wheelchair in the very center of the party, part of a small circle: he, a tall man with dark hair who had his back to the photographer, a woman with cascading black curls in a loose white dress and, younger but easily recognizable Lionel Luthor stood closely together.
"Dr Swann was the man who established first contact between Earth and the Kryptonian rebel. The lady next to him was called Hippolyta, no one knows who she really was or what happened to her after the invasion. This is my father."
The man with his back to the photographer remained unnamed; Lex pointed at another group, positioned more to the side. A young blonde couple, a beautiful red-haired woman and a somewhat elderly couple, he balding, she dark-haired and wearing a pearl necklace, stood by a buffet and laughed at something.
"This is my mother, Bruce's parents and those two are the Queens - "
"Queen? Like Ollie Queen?"
"His parents didn't die in a plane crash as he believes. They were executed – just like Bruce's parents. They never got a trial – just a bullet in some back alley. The executioners were human, but they took their orders from Kryptonians." Lex paused, then picked another small group. There was a broad-shouldered, stern-faced man in military uniform, a young blond man and a very attractive brunette in a low-cut dress. A little to the side, eyeing them mistrustfully, stood a huge man with a graying beard and mane of blonde hair. His clothes, like Hippolyta's, did not fit entirely into the setting. "I don't know who he is, but these people are Barry Allen, Bart's grandfather, Genevieve Teague – and this man is General Lane – Lois's father. He was also executed by human military when he refused to take orders from Kryptonians."
"But - - that can't be a coincidence!"
"It isn't. There's something that ties the children of all these people together, Kal-El," Lex answered, his eyes turning hard as he stared at the picture. He put it on the desk, face-up.
"They knew the invasion was coming and they prepared. It was Barry Allen who first suggested using the meta-gene to turn people into super-soldiers. He was a metahuman himself; a laboratory accident triggered his meta-gene. My father, the Queens, the Waynes and Dr Swann made a joint venture of it, uniting their financial resources: Project Ares. Our Kryptonian ally supplied them with mutagenic substances. At some point they made a pact: after the first successful trials on animals, each of them would give one of their children to be subjected to the treatment. I guess it was born out of idealism – the Queens and the Waynes balked at the idea of stealing other children, and children were known to be most receptive to meta-treatment. Swann himself had no children, so he was exempt, but Oliver Queen, Bruce Wayne, Jason Teague, General Lane's niece Chloe Sullivan, Allen's grandson Bart Allen and I are all subjects of Project Ares.
"The gene therapy remained unsuccessful in Bruce's and Ollie's cases, and gave me and Chloe only passive powers. Bart is a full success, and so was Jason Teague, but they got him and brainwashed him in Belle Reve a few years ago. As far as I know, he is living a quiet life with a nice, pretty wife in some small town near Metropolis. According to my father, Hippolyta and the unnamed gentleman with the beard resisted the idea of contributing their only heirs to the experiments, so they both left, their fate unknown."
Unable to process so much at once, Kal pointed at the one person in the picture Lex hadn't mentioned: the man standing with his back to the photographer in the same group as Lionel Luthor. "Who is that?"
"The Kryptonian rebel," Lex said quietly. "Your father."
Title: The Light and the Silence (5/?)
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:
Five
It soon became clear to Kal that Lex was far more than just 'one of them'. He ordered Bart to stay behind with the humans on the ship, and told Alicia to take him and Kal to the rebel hideout immediately. She stepped closer to them, put a hand each on one of their shoulders and gave Kal a tiny encouraging smile before teleporting. The sensation was odd, like bathing in one of the sweet fizzy soda drinks humans loved to drink.
It prickled oddly, and then his body flowed back together in a dark place. It was a cavern, the ground rust-red and dusty, and the ceiling vanishing in darkness high above them. Jagged rock formations hung down from the ceiling like the teeth of a dragon, and there was a rustling of shadows everywhere, people hidden in the darkness. In the dim light of electric lanterns, Alicia with her white clothes and fair hair seemed to glow, and Lex appeared pale as a paper moon. To their right, a yawning abyss cut into the cave and there was a flight of stairs carved straight from the red rock going down without a visible end.
Lex took a deep breath next to Kal. He fingered his collar. "It's time to take this off," he said.
Keeping his eyes on his hands, unable to look at Lex, Kal took off one glove and pressed his thumb to the collar. With his index finger, he could feel a quick, hot pulse beating right under the smooth skin, and then the collar melted from its unbreakable crystalline form back into a soft band and slid off Lex's neck.
"Got him well trained," Alicia commented, and Kal took a quick step back, flushing at her wicked little grin.
"Bruce?" Lex asked, ignoring her teasing.
"Down in the solarium. Alfred's trying to patch him up and feed him, and Vic is ranting at him about our lack of supplies. Lucius and Hamilton are probably still arguing whether the implants are salvageable." Alicia hesitated, and brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear. "He's worse than usual, Lex. He keeps playing with that silver thing – he's out of his mind."
"When hasn't he been?"
Lex took the collar from Kal and put it back into his belt, then led the way down the carved stairs. Kal blinked and tried to feel his way in the dark, afraid of tripping and falling into the bottomless chasm. A cold, dry draft came up from the hidden depths. Then suddenly, there were no more steps, just flat ground that seemed smoother somehow than the stairs, and above and around them, an archway, tall enough for giants, lit up. The rounded arch narrowed to a pointy tip at the top, like a lancet, and seemed to be made all of one slab of black, glittering stone. There were tiny, glowing glyphs all over, like blue veins of light, but they were neither written in Kryptonian nor any in Earth language. Behind it, the room was no longer a cavern, but clearly artificially made, and as Alicia and Kal followed Lex through the arch, the glyphs lit up more brightly, showing other doors further down and corridors branching off into other directions. There was no artificial light in the dim corridors apart from the glowing glyphs that adorned the wall every few feet.
As they walked further, Kal noticed that the walls were in many places covered in delicate mosaics made from orange and red stones, and some of them showed what looked like plants and mountains; others appeared to be star constellations, and again others showed all kinds of creatures, one kind in particular that was always depicted with shimmering green stones and looked much like an upright lizard or insect.
"Was this made by humans?" he asked in wonder. He knew that humans had produced countless artifacts without purpose – they called it "art", a primitive tradition that was slowly dying out under the influence of progressive Kryptonian civilization. But the rebels could hardly have found the time or resources to do so, could they?
"We found it like this when we first arrived," Lex said, but he did not stop to admire the mosaics, instead heading deeper and deeper into the structure. It was not at all like Arkham, no horrible smells or noises greeted them, just solemn silence and dry air.
Alicia trailed the tips of her gloved fingers over the mosaics as they walked past and smiled. "They're beautiful, aren't they?"
"Do they … do anything?" Kal asked, feeling rather stupid.
"I think it tells a story. About the people who made it, their lives, their hopes, their dreams – "
Further ahead, Lex had reached the end of the corridor. There was another archway, this one smaller, and the room beyond it was filled with a gloomy rust-colored glow, as if the red rocks themselves were emitting a soft light. Two men were arguing loudly. Their voices bounced off the walls, echoing and rippling like small waves on a pond. Kal and Alicia reached the arch. Stair went down from there to the centre of the room, which turned out to be an almost perfect sphere, large enough to contain a small house. The sphere was broken only by the arch and a circular hole at the very top through which sunlight flooded in through a long shaft about twenty feet in diameter. The sun had to be standing almost directly above it, otherwise the room would have been dark. As it was, the light hit the small space glider Kal and Lex had bought on Earth, which was suspended on steel chords from what looked like a rather makeshift metal scaffold. Reflected by the Sunrider's golden hull, the sunlight was warm and bright. Kal wondered what the purpose of the room had once been – perhaps it was a former well, but that did not explain why the red stone walls were polished almost to perfect smoothness, and inlaid with small pieces of yellow stone or glass that looked a bit like star constellations.
Beneath the suspended glider, the scaffold went on, broadening into a larger platform which presently housed a large, silver chair with black cushions. A man lay sprawled in it, one-armed, dark-haired, his large body wiry and emaciated, but clean. Next to the chair stood a tall, thin man, neatly dressed for the rebels' standards, with a pencil mustache and an aloof expression. He was dabbing a few cuts and bruises the prone man sported, while at the same time carrying a tray with a bowl and several sandwiches.
The man in the chair, Kal now realized, was Bruce Wayne, the Batman, leader of the rebels. The robotic arm he had worn in Arkham had been removed. Two middle-aged black men were arguing over it. They had it partly dismantled on a table before them, and the one in the smudged lab-coat and the goggles was angrily waving a screwdriver-like object. He was gaunt, and somewhat stooped, as if he was used to scurrying in dark places, and he was twitchy and nervous. The somewhat older man he was arguing with, whose hair was peppered with grey and white, appeared much calmer. There were two other people in the room: a young man whose body was partly replaced by the same kind of robotic implants Wayne wore, the cool metal contrasting sharply with his cocoa-colored skin and who stood with his arms crossed next to the Batman's chair, talking softly to him and sometimes glaring at the two arguing scientists. The sixth person was the last Kal spotted: a limber young man with dark hair, a healthy tan and a merry grin, climbing around on the glider as nimbly as a monkey. He was the first to notice Lex walking down the stairs, and he flipped backwards off the glider. Kal gaped in astonishment as the young man hurtled through the air like a fish in the water and landed softly on his feet right in front of them.
"Lex!" he exclaimed. "Holy Martian canals, Bruce and you on the same day! It's like Christmas and Invasion Day all at once!" The man with the goggles glared at the youth, while the older scientist smiled affectionately.
"Assuming that I'm Christmas, nice to see you too, Dick," Lex greeted him, and Kal saw the flash of a smile as he tilted his face at Dick. He wanted to follow him into the cavern, but as he started forward, Alicia seized his hand and held him back with a shake of her head.
"Let him do the talking," she whispered. "He could talk Bruce out of sleeping with a batarang under his pillow if he wanted to."
"Lex," the older scientist greeted with a nod, and Lex returned the nod with a polite, "Mr Fox, Dr Hamilton," then turned towards the young cyborg and said, "Hello Vic. The place looks fine, better than when I last saw it. You've worked wonders."
"You've been away a long time," the cyborg replied in a rather reserved tone.
Wayne had sat up on his single elbow, his stump pressed against his side, eyeing Lex with one blue and one mechanical eye, but the man with the tray continued dabbing his wounds. "Welcome back, Master Lex. Would you like a sandwich?" His voice was prim and oddly accented, as if he had never even heard of standardization reforms.
"No thanks, Alfred. And please, don't call me master. I get called that enough on Earth. England's an awfully long way from here."
"Distance makes the heart grow fonder," the man called Alfred replied calmly, and to Batman added, "Master Bruce, please do be sensible and eat. You are but skin and bones."
Dick crouched beside the chair. He spoke softly, but Kal could still hear a tone of worry and affection. "Yeah, Bruce. You don't look so hot."
Bruce Wayne ignored him and sat fully up. His one hand he kept clenched in a fist. His alert eyes flickered from Lex to Kal. He felt Alicia's hand drop out of his as they fell under scrutiny and to his surprise he missed the touch, felt more vulnerable without it.
"The Kryptonian," Wayne rasped. "Why is he still running free?"
"A change of plan," Lex replied.
"You're not the one to change plans around here, Lex."
"Am I not?" Lex asked. "I was under impression that this was a joint venture."
"On Earth you might have influence," Victor injected, "but here you're just your father's errand boy, Luthor."
Kal sucked in a startled breath and nearly choked on it. Luthor. Lex was Lionel Luthor's son. Lex Luthor. Alexander Luthor. He had let himself be lulled in by the human's sly talk about the meaning of names, when it was so obvious. Alexander Luthor hadn't been kidnapped by rebels. He was a rebel, and more than ten years older than the little boy in the photograph.
Kal had been lied to and betrayed from the very first moment. But why? Why did they do that? A change of plan, Lex had said. What plan? Was it all a scheme to lure him here? He was just the son of a minor house, no one would pay a ransom for him –
"I'm not going to go into the fact that I am a metahuman," Lex looked from Victor to Bruce Wayne. "Certain parts of our organization, I am sure, have noticed that as well. And metas are the backbone of this enterprise."
"Humans are," Wayne growled.
Lex circled the chair, keeping all eyes on him, and glanced around, from one to the other, at each of them, clearly challenging. "That sounds very nice, but I can't help noticing that you surround yourself with people who don't have an active metagene. None of your closest supporters are metahumans, Bruce. And I know what you think about us. We're unstable. Dangerous. Our powers make us arrogant. You prefer technology, because he can control it, micromanage it down to last bit. Given the choice you'd rather trust a monster you created yourself."
"What do you want, Lex?" The Batman looked angry, driven into a corner, and Kal thought it was a rather foolish thing to try and corner this man.
But Lex seemed unconcerned. He put a hand onto the armrest of the chair and leaned close, nearly speaking into Wayne's ear. "I admit that a dead Kryptonian could have been useful, if that was the only thing we could get. But imagine having a live Kryptonian in our ranks. A real one, fighting for our cause. I want him, Bruce. He's different. Question the people who came with us, if you don't believe me. You know what he could do, once he sheds his limitations."
"That's exactly why I don't want it! He's dangerous enough as it is."
"And Project Doomsday won't be dangerous?"
The calmer of the two scientists, Mr Fox, injected, "He's right about that. You know my reservations regarding Project Doomsday."
"Reservations!" Dr Hamilton scoffed. "Reservations won't get us anywhere. Science isn't for cowards – of course an bureaucrat like you wouldn't understand." He eyed Kal with glittering, nervous eyes. "Look at it. It's what we need to complete Doomsday."
Lex ignored Hamilton. "Think about it, Bruce. Dead, he can be harvested for weapons, but alive, he can be victory."
Kal took a horrified step back at Lex's hissed words, terror seizing him, making him sick. These beautiful caverns housed the same terror as Arkham. Once again, Alicia grabbed his wrist and forced him to stay, to listen.
"You're going to fight me for him," Wayne stated with narrowed eyes. Lex nodded solemnly. Wayne frowned. "I want contingency measures."
Grim but smiling, Lex reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small leaden case. "Lady Jan assured me that this should take care of any Kryptonian."
Batman stared at the case without taking it. Lex's face softened somewhat, and he sighed. "It's a ring, Bruce, not a bullet."
Wayne took the case then, and as he opened his hand there was a glint of silver. Quick as a striking snake, Lex seized his wrist and tried to pry the silver object from him, but Kal had barely seen the small round disk when Wayne snatched it away again. It had looked rusty, but silver rusted black, not red, so maybe there was a stain of blood on it.
"You met Harvey on the way out," Lex said flatly. Everyone had been listening to them with bated breath, but at this the silence turned leaden and heavy.
"I took the coin," Wayne said, and Kal remembered Harvey Dent of Arkham, who had also had a small silver disk like this one. He did not understand, only that something terrible hung like a storm over their conversation.
"Did you kill him?"
Wayne clenched his fingers to fist around the coin, his knuckles and the lines of his scars stark white, and pressed it against his bare chest. "I set him free."
Lex remained where he stood for a moment, straight-backed and still confrontational, but then, without moving very much at all, he seemed to open-up to the man in the chair. He put a hand on his shoulder and looked him straight in the face as he said something too soft for anyone else to hear. For a short moment, he seemed to wait for an answer or search for a reaction, but Wayne's face changed no more than a photograph. Lex stepped back again.
"This is settled, then," he said, clearly intended for everyone in the room. "Project Doomsday is on ice. I'll," he turned around to look up at Kal and Alicia, "take care of our guest."
Neither Batman nor any of the other humans objected, although Dr Hamilton looked angry and Mr Fox rather relieved. Kal had the distinct feeling that Lex had won a verbal battle – maybe by having the stronger position, but maybe just by steering the argument towards Batman's weakest points. He wondered what the story between Lex and Bruce Wayne was, and how Harvey Dent figured into it.
They left the spherical room and returned to the dim corridor that had led them there. Waves of tension still radiated off Lex as he strode away, but Alicia gave Kal a small grin as they hurried after him. "Good thing Lex likes you," she whispered. "It would have been a shame if Hamilton had turned you into one of his Frankenstein experiments."
Kal didn't know what Frankenstein was, but he had a good enough idea. The other thing, though – "He likes me?"
"Sure he does. If Lex doesn't treat you like a servant or piece of furniture, it means he either likes you or hates you."
"Alicia, would you go an see how Bart is holding up?" Lex said calmly, without bothering to turn around or stop. Alicia rolled her eyes.
"Case in point," she shrugged and dissolved into nothing. Suddenly Kal was alone with Lex. He had a hard time ordering his racing thoughts, and felt like he had already forgotten a million important things that had been said back in there, but one thing still stood out.
"You're Alexander Luthor. You're the boy we were looking for."
"Yes. I would prefer to explain things to you in private and in a more comfortable setting, though." At this, Lex turned sharply left, into a corridor branching off the main one. It quickly narrowed into a steep flight of stairs. There were no light sources apart from a dim glow up ahead that they climbed towards, and Kal had to try too hard not to loose his footing to argue with Lex. After a seemingly endless climb, the glow grew brighter and they reached the top. It came from a circular window on top of a stone door. Lex hesitated a moment, then touched the dusty red stone with his index finger and started drawing lines and squiggles. They lit up in the wake of his finger, glittering letters of an alien alphabet. When he was finished, the door slid open with a grinding groan.
The room beyond was about three or four times the size of Kal's old room at home, rectangular, far longer than it was wide and with a higher ceiling than the corridors. The door through which they had entered was situated on the long side of the rectangle, and the long wall opposite them appeared to be made of black crystal or glass, opaque except for a thin space on top through which light flooded into the room. Beyond that wall the surface of Mars had to lie. For the most part, the room was bare stone – bare walls, bare floor, bare ceiling, but there were a few pieces of furniture that looked distinctly human: a desk, several cabinets, a closet and a bed – one of those strange human contraptions that were all soft cushions and blankets and wide enough for two. Its mere presence made Kal uncomfortably aware of certain things about which he had always wondered, and he turned away to face the desk and the cabinets. There were two chairs, not very comfortable looking, and Lex pulled out one of them and offered it to Kal, who sat down but then regretted it when Lex remained standing, leaning with his hip against the desk and looking down at Kal with an odd expression: partly thoughtful, partly satisfied, and all in all rather proprietary.
"I am Alexander Luthor," he began after a moment, "but I would still prefer if you called me Lex. As you've probably guessed, my father is part of this organization. We had heard rumors that a young Kryptonian was looking for dangerous and well-paying work, and since our scientists up here have been wanting a complete specimen of a Kryptonian – alive or dead – for a while, I suggested hiring you. Sending you on a bounty hunt took care of two problems: how to get you to trust me enough to disarm you, and how to get a Kryptonian body and an illegal metahuman out of Earth and to Mars. At least that was the plan as my father conceived it."
Having grown up with the Kents as his caretakers, Kal had never entirely been able to believe in the commonly held opinion that humans in their natural state were a brutal, compassionless and cunning people. But now, as this plan was revealed to him, he couldn't doubt it. The same tight coil of discomfort and horror he had felt at his own people not long before returned, now directed at the people he thought were the victims.
But then again, they weren't doing it senselessly, as Kal's people did, weren't they? They had a reason to be so ruthless.
"Why didn't you do it that way?" he asked Lex. Kal didn't doubt that Lex could have disarmed or even killed him any time without taking them to Arkham first.
"I never intended to follow my Dad's plan," Lex replied, giving him a slight shrug. "Going to Arkham was as much a priority as bringing you to Mars."
"Because of… Bruce Wayne? You were going to break him out?"
"That would have depended entirely on the situation. In a worst case scenario, I would have tried to kill him."
Kal recoiled – the two men had argued in front of him, but he could not believe that they wanted each other dead. Lex was watching him carefully.
"Remember what Colonel Lane told us," he reminded Kal. "Only two kinds of people leave Arkham: dead men and the Batman. He hadn't broken out on his own in nearly two years, so I had to consider it at least a possibility that they had broken him beyond repair. Then killing him would have been… the only respectful thing to do. Dad would have considered that an unnecessary risk, of course."
"We would never have made it out without Colonel Lane and her friend," Kal said as he realized that Lex had actually been planning on fighting out their way alone.
But Lex gave him a superior smirk. "That's why Colonel Lane was there, Kal. I gave her an anonymous tip. She was searching for her cousin for years, and due to her position in the military, it was a good bet that she could get into Arkham and would try to free her if given the chance."
"That's –" Kal stared at him open-mouthed.
"A number of people have assured me that under different circumstances, I'd be a criminal mastermind," Lex said, and a grin broke through his serious expression. "And my Dad calls me a reckless irresponsible dreamer."
Kal blinked at the words – he knew them well, his own father had often complained about the same flaws in him. He imagined Lionel Luthor's wrath to be a lot less pleasant that Jor-El's tired admonishments, though.
"Why was it so important to you to get Wayne out of Arkham?"
Lex's attention seemed to turn inside. He glanced away, into the distance, and remained silent for quite some time. Then he turned around, still perching on the desk, and picked up a stack of old folders. From underneath them, he pulled out a picture frame. He gazed at it for almost a minute before giving it to Kal.
It was a big photograph with many people in it. The scene was unfamiliar, it had most likely been taken before the liberation – the invasion, Kal reminded himself. There were only humans in it, the men wearing dark suits and the woman in dresses that left little to the imagination, their hair styled perfectly. This was how the rich and powerful had once looked on Earth. Many of them held thin glasses in their hands, and in the background, Kal spotted wood-paneled walls and stained glass windows.
"Who are these people?"
Lex took tilted the picture so he could see it as well. He didn't answer directly. "I first met Bruce as a boy. He and I might have gone to the same boarding school if the invasion hadn't happened. Both our parents were rich and his parents knew mine. But we didn't meet at school. We met in a hospital – a research facility. You see, our parents were the forerunners of the rebels you've met today."
"But this was before the invasion," Kal objected. "How could they have known - ?"
"They knew. One of your people had warned them, a sympathizer with humans, or some kind of rebel, who knows what his true motivation was. They had no official name for themselves… you could probably call them a conspiracy. Businessmen, high-ranking military, scientists, even royalty, if I'm not mistaken." He pointed at a man in a wheelchair in the very center of the party, part of a small circle: he, a tall man with dark hair who had his back to the photographer, a woman with cascading black curls in a loose white dress and, younger but easily recognizable Lionel Luthor stood closely together.
"Dr Swann was the man who established first contact between Earth and the Kryptonian rebel. The lady next to him was called Hippolyta, no one knows who she really was or what happened to her after the invasion. This is my father."
The man with his back to the photographer remained unnamed; Lex pointed at another group, positioned more to the side. A young blonde couple, a beautiful red-haired woman and a somewhat elderly couple, he balding, she dark-haired and wearing a pearl necklace, stood by a buffet and laughed at something.
"This is my mother, Bruce's parents and those two are the Queens - "
"Queen? Like Ollie Queen?"
"His parents didn't die in a plane crash as he believes. They were executed – just like Bruce's parents. They never got a trial – just a bullet in some back alley. The executioners were human, but they took their orders from Kryptonians." Lex paused, then picked another small group. There was a broad-shouldered, stern-faced man in military uniform, a young blond man and a very attractive brunette in a low-cut dress. A little to the side, eyeing them mistrustfully, stood a huge man with a graying beard and mane of blonde hair. His clothes, like Hippolyta's, did not fit entirely into the setting. "I don't know who he is, but these people are Barry Allen, Bart's grandfather, Genevieve Teague – and this man is General Lane – Lois's father. He was also executed by human military when he refused to take orders from Kryptonians."
"But - - that can't be a coincidence!"
"It isn't. There's something that ties the children of all these people together, Kal-El," Lex answered, his eyes turning hard as he stared at the picture. He put it on the desk, face-up.
"They knew the invasion was coming and they prepared. It was Barry Allen who first suggested using the meta-gene to turn people into super-soldiers. He was a metahuman himself; a laboratory accident triggered his meta-gene. My father, the Queens, the Waynes and Dr Swann made a joint venture of it, uniting their financial resources: Project Ares. Our Kryptonian ally supplied them with mutagenic substances. At some point they made a pact: after the first successful trials on animals, each of them would give one of their children to be subjected to the treatment. I guess it was born out of idealism – the Queens and the Waynes balked at the idea of stealing other children, and children were known to be most receptive to meta-treatment. Swann himself had no children, so he was exempt, but Oliver Queen, Bruce Wayne, Jason Teague, General Lane's niece Chloe Sullivan, Allen's grandson Bart Allen and I are all subjects of Project Ares.
"The gene therapy remained unsuccessful in Bruce's and Ollie's cases, and gave me and Chloe only passive powers. Bart is a full success, and so was Jason Teague, but they got him and brainwashed him in Belle Reve a few years ago. As far as I know, he is living a quiet life with a nice, pretty wife in some small town near Metropolis. According to my father, Hippolyta and the unnamed gentleman with the beard resisted the idea of contributing their only heirs to the experiments, so they both left, their fate unknown."
Unable to process so much at once, Kal pointed at the one person in the picture Lex hadn't mentioned: the man standing with his back to the photographer in the same group as Lionel Luthor. "Who is that?"
"The Kryptonian rebel," Lex said quietly. "Your father."
