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laniew1So this is most likely going to be four parts instead of three, Clark got kind of wordy and Lex started making long-winded explanations…
Clark wondered why Lex had managed to get all the family stuff and Clark had gotten death and destruction. It really wasn’t fair.
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Read this Part 1 and this Part 2 first.
TITLE: The Other Side – 3/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex, Alt Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 3
Lex had a room ready for Kon. Clark wasn’t sure why he was surprised, he’d spent an entire week watching Kon interact with Lex in the same manner that Clark could remember interacting with his father.
He kept thinking he should be happy that Kon’s relationship with Lex didn’t mimic Lex’s with Lionel, but in the back of his mind he thought that maybe it would be easier for him if Kon and Lex had been trying to stab each other in the back.
And it wasn’t like Kon didn’t interact in the same manner with him, because he did. This Kon was used to treating Lex and Clark as his parental figures (even if he didn’t call them dad and dad) and it appeared to be something he just couldn’t shut off just because Lex and Clark weren’t his Lex and Clark.
When it had become obvious that Kon was as healed as he was going to get Lex had announced that Kon would be coming home with him. And there was nothing he could say (besides subtle reminders that this wasn’t Kon’s world and maybe he wanted to not go with a Lex that he didn’t know the first thing about) when Kon acted like it was perfectly normal for Lex to want him to go home with him and for him to want to go home with Lex.
Clark went with them, because one lecture from Bruce about his lack of intelligence in regards to Lex Luthor and Kon was his limit for the year.
Mercy met them when they landed, all three in civilian clothes and though she turned her nose up at Clark she didn’t try to kill him so Clark was taking that for a success.
The other shoe would drop eventually and Lex would go back to trying to take over the world and Clark would go back to stopping him from doing so and Kon would unfortunately be caught in the middle.
A short drive to the penthouse and it had been a long time since Clark had been there as anything besides Lex’s enemy; he recognized absolutely nothing when they entered. Kon already looked like he’d had enough with dealing with the two of them being silent at each other and Clark wanted to tell him to get used to it because it had been almost 15 years since he and Lex had been able to be even remotely civil to one another.
When Lex led him to a room that was obviously supposed to be his a slight smile appeared on his face, the first one that had crossed it in days and Clark hadn’t realized how much he’d become used to Kon smiling and being comfortable with them until he wasn’t anymore.
Right now Kon looked relaxed and if not happy then sort of relieved, sort of like he felt when he got to go back to the farm… like he was home or at least in a place that he recognized as home.
Clark wondered why Lex had managed to get all the family stuff and Clark had gotten death and destruction. It really wasn’t fair.
He closed the door, a flimsy barrier between him and a Lex and Clark that wanted to help him but weren’t the family he wanted.
“You don’t need to stay,” Lex said finally, one last glance at the closed door before he sighed and walked towards the living room.
“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” Clark followed him, and he didn’t. Because his name had been removed from the JLA roster and his only assignment as Superman was to figure out how to handle a Kon-El that hadn’t seen anything wrong with leaving the Watchtower with Lex Luthor.
Batman was thinking brainwashing, but seeing as how Clark had only left Kon and Lex alone for five minutes he thought it near impossible that it could be that.
“You mean you don’t trust me alone with Kon,” Lex poured himself a drink, taking a sip and looking at Clark over the rim of the glass. He pointedly didn’t offer anything to him and Clark had to bite his tongue to say something snide about manners and guests.
“Well really, do you blame me?” Clark glanced back at the closed door. As long as he’d known Lex the other man had normally had four plans, three of which they would know about and then the fourth would be pulled out of nowhere to smack him upside the head with Kryptonite at the most inopportune moment.
“You were never interested in him before; excuse me for thinking that you might have ulterior motives.”
“You seemed to be screwing him up enough for the both of us,” Lex retorted.
“Do we have to fight every single time we’re in the same room? Can’t we just agree that Kon needs both of us, expects to have both of us without being at each others throats.”
“Well maybe if you’d stop picking them we wouldn’t fight all the time, I never wanted to fight with you Clark. Superman yes, you no.”
“You can’t fight with just one of us. We’re the same person,” Clark ground his teeth, it was like having that conversation with Lois all over again, the one where she didn’t understand why she couldn’t just love Superman and think Clark was an idiot.
He was also frustrated and angry and worried that Kon was going to try and flee out the window when he heard them arguing.
“You’re human, you make mistakes. Superman is… not human.”
They always had the same fight, every single time. He could probably recite it and save Lex the energy from having to spout the same words out.
Superman was an alien, Superman had no reason to want to help the human race and was obviously just lulling them into a false sense of security so that he could take over the planet with little to no resistance.
Batman had felt that way at one point, might still for all he knew. He did know that Batman had a half a dozen ways to stop him if he tried; if Bruce and Lex could work together they might actually be able to destroy him if he ever went insane.
But they couldn’t, and they would never need to. Because Clark had spent a lot of time making sure that he couldn’t fulfill his father’s purpose for sending him to Earth.
“Were they even able to be in the same room without fighting all the time,” he wondered out loud. Lex glanced over at him.
“They were lovers, Clark.”
“I kind of figured that out all by myself, I’m not an idiot,” Lex looked like he wanted to argue with him about that fact. “That doesn’t automatically mean that they weren’t fighting every single other moment they spent together.”
Lex looked away from him.
“They came to terms that allowed them to peacefully co-exist without forcing Kon to choose between them.”
“Well that’s really vague.”
“I don’t know Clark. I never saw whatever conversation they had that allowed them their truce. Sometimes I wish I had,” the last sentence was barely breathed. If he’d been anyone else he wouldn’t have heard it.
“What do we need to do? To make him comfortable here, to allow him to trust us.”
Lex looked back at him, eyes piercing and intent, like he could judge Clark’s intent purely by his gaze alone.
“Well first, we need to be able to be in the same room without fighting all the time.”
“So what? We forget the past happened and try to be friends again?” Off the top of his head he could think of three people that would think that he had been the one brainwashed.
“We were able to be friends once; we could at least try and be civil to one another. I tell you that I won’t try and take over the world and you tell me that you won’t watch me like you expect me to do that at any possible moment.”
“Should we put that in writing? Because no one is going to believe this.”
******************************************************************************
The bed was identical to his, the furniture, the pictures, the mess he’d left on the floor before the world had fallen apart. If he didn’t know better he would think that he was home.
But he wasn’t.
The Lex and Clark here were trying to be quiet, but Kon could hear them arguing two rooms over and he wondered how they’d been raising their Kon if they couldn’t even have one civil conversation. He didn’t want to wonder what had happened to his counterpart, because it was kind of obvious that he was gone.
Probably dead.
He laid back on the bed, new sheets and new pillows and he was really sure that their Kon had never stayed in this room, not once… because nothing was broke in.
And everything smelled new and unused, like it had when he’d first gone to live with Lex. When he’d been young and scared and really unsure as to whether this was even a smart move.
It had all turned out all right but that first night he hadn’t slept, instead he’d sat in the middle of his bed the entire night waiting for an attack that he was sure was going to come the minute that he’d let his guard down.
He’d found out later that Superman had flown around the penthouse the entire night waiting for the very same thing.
But no attack had come and it had taken a few days more before they’d all relaxed.
It had taken a year before he stopped wondering if he let his guard down too much if Lex was going to dissect him in a lab. Another six months past that when he’d started to think of Lex as his father, even though he never called him that to his face.
He’d trusted Lex a lot sooner then Clark had, but then Clark had a lot more years of actual history and anger and hatred to work past.
He turned over on his side on the bed, staring at the picture on his nightstand. It was one of Young Justice, him and Bart and Tim and Cassie and Cissie looking unbearably young and innocent.
He wondered where this Lex had gotten it from. Because if it was pretty obvious that his counterpart had never stepped foot into this room, then there was no reason for Lex to have this picture in the first place, the him that had been here might possibly have never even had the picture in the first place.
Things could have been vastly different here from what his world had been like.
His gaze locked on Tim and Cassie’s faces. Cassie had a wide, happy grin. Tim didn’t look as stoic as he normally did though you really had to look to see any sort of expression.
He’d loved them more then he’d loved anything else in his life. His heart still hurt to think about the betrayal, images flashing through his mind like snapshots. Images of them wrapped in each other looking up at him in dismay and shock…
They’d known that it had been wrong; they’d tried to apologize, tried using pretty words that he couldn’t even remember anymore… all he’d only been able to think of was how many times they had done it when he hadn’t been around to catch them and wondered when they’d been planning on telling him.
Or if they were just going to let him continue thinking that everything was okay, when really they hadn’t wanted anything to do with him anymore.
He’d thought he’d buried any feelings that he’d had for them, but his heart and soul had ached at seeing Tim’s body broken and mangled, ached at holding Cassie in his arms, looking up at him in the last seconds of her life telling him that they’d love him forever.
He’d screamed his heartache to the heavens, tears streaming down his face, seconds later he’d gotten the call from the Fortress. The A.I. panicked and screeching as Doomsday had obliterated it.
Had killed Lex immediately because when he’d gotten to the Fortress the only heartbeat that he’d heard was Superman’s, the only sound he’d heard was Clark’s whispering, softly to Lex even though the other man was dead and…
He wiped a hand across his face and wondered where the tears were coming from.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered and he didn’t know who he was apologizing to.
He was alive, but his world was gone.
Donna and Dick and Bart and Connor were all gone. The last people that he’d ever fought with and at the end he’d not even wanted to fight.
He’d been all for just curling up in a ball on Superman’s bed and waiting for Doomsday to destroy the Tower because he’d already lost everything that he’d ever cared about, everything that would have made fighting worth it.
Because Cassie and Tim were gone, there would be no forgiveness given or received.
Clark and Lex were gone; there was no family for him to take comfort in.
Superman gone, Supergirl gone. He had been the last of his kind and he’d only been a half-blood Kryptonian as it was.
They were all here though, all those people that he would have been willing to fight for, willing to die for were here, he knew that.
But this Cassie and Tim didn’t know him. This Clark and Lex didn’t know how to interact with him and he wondered again what their relationships with his counterpart had been like.
Had this Kon had a family?
Or had he been as utterly alone as Kon now felt.
******************************************************************************
The scene that he walked into was so eerily familiar that for a whole ten seconds Kon thought he might be able to fool himself into believing that everything had been a horrible nightmare.
Lex was sitting in his chair, coffee in front of him, toast sitting on a plate untouched, paper open.
Clark was sitting in his chair, two glasses; one with orange juice, one with milk and a full plate of eggs and potatoes and bacon that he was busily working his way through. At his elbow was his copy of the Daily Planet and they were having an argument that Kon had heard almost every other morning for all the years that he’d been alive.
“Good morning Kon,” Lex noticed him first and that was when he was reminded that this wasn’t his parents or his world. Because Lex looked away from Clark and focused on Kon and that had very rarely happened unless he was in trouble.
“Morning,” he mumbled, sliding into his chair and there was a glass of milk already there him and Becky (who’d always been their cook so he spared a smile for her, because familiar face) slid a plate filled similarly to the one Clark was finishing in front of him.
“Did you sleep okay?” Clark set his fork down, tapped his finger against the edge of his glass of milk and stared at him intently.
Kon stared at his plate, shifting uncomfortably, because it had been a long time since he’d sat a table with a Clark and Lex that were trying too hard to be a family.
“Fine,” he muttered, he nibbled on slice of bacon even though he wasn’t hungry.
“That shield thing that you used against us in the Watchtower,” Lex said suddenly. “How did you do that?”
Kon looked up at him, and wondered who the Kon here had been. The first thing he’d done, that they’d done was figure out his powers.
“It’s the T.T…”
“Tactile Telekinesis,” Clark offered quietly.
“I’m quite aware of what Kon’s abilities are,” Lex glared at him.
Kon cleared his throat, “I can use it to kind of push things away if I want, kind of like a shield. Tim…” he stopped. Because Tim had been the one that helped him work through his powers one by one until they figured out what all his limitations were and then they’d pushed further because Tim had thought that with training he could use them for even more.
“Tim helped you develop on your powers?” Lex looked surprised. Like he’d thought that he’d been the one that would have helped him and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell them that Lex had fought him being in any way involved in super-hero politics before he turned 18 and had lost (and not graciously either).
Because half of him may have been Lex, but the other half was Clark and he’d gotten all the parts of Clark that said that he had powers for a reason and that he just couldn’t sit around and wait to turn 18 to use them to help people.
He didn’t tell them that at the beginning Tim hadn’t been helping him because he’d wanted to, he’d been helping him at first because Batman had wanted to know what Kon’s limitations were so he could determine a way to stop him if he went bad.
Because he’d been half Lex Luthor and the cape community had all know that. For most of them Lex Luthor meant evil personified and anyone that shared his blood was bound to try and destroy the world at some point.
He glanced over at Clark and decided that either Clark had figured that out already (it had taken him/them much longer before) or his breakfast wasn’t sitting well with him.
He wanted to tell him not to worry about it. That he hadn’t blamed Batman or Robin, still didn’t.
And they’d been able to use the information that Tim had gotten from that exercise to shut Match down when he’d appeared, if they hadn’t Match would have done a lot more damage then what he’d ended up doing.
It wouldn’t make any difference what he said though, it hadn’t back then. Superman would still end up having words with Batman, they might have the same argument and might not talk for a few months like Clark and Bruce had originally.
But they would end up working it out and they’d go back to being the World’s Finest and him and this Tim might have the same laugh that he’d had with his about the fact that eventually the World’s Finest… well that might some day be them.
******************************************************************************
He was being watched.
He could feel eyes focused on his back and he could feel Mercy getting twitchy beside him. From past experience he knew that she was seconds away from pulling her gun and hustling him away.
He needed clothes though, the ones that Lex had filled his closet with were okay, but he couldn’t believe that their Kon would have been caught dead in them.
Dress pants and dress shirts in every color of the rainbow, blazers and dress shoes and there wasn’t a pair of jeans or t-shirt to be found.
“We’re being watched,” Mercy said quietly, her lips didn’t move and her expression didn’t change. When Kon had first met her he’d spent days trying to figure out how she did that.
“I know,” Kon paused looking through the rack, glanced back at the cart that was half full and rolled his shoulders.
He hated shopping, with a passion. But this experience was hands down better then the first time he’d had to do this.
Then Clark and Lex had accompanied him…
…because god forbid he go somewhere by himself, someone might walk off with him and he snorted in his head just like he’d snorted out loud back then.
Because, hello?
Superpowers.
So back then Clark and Lex had come with him and then had proceeded to spend the majority of the time bickering over what exactly proper clothing for him had been, he’d tuned them out and just tossed stuff that made both of them cringe into the hands of the store employees that Lex had commandeered.
It had been the only fun he had that day.
“Tim and Dick,” he said quietly. He pulled a shirt out just so he could snort at it. Lex would wear it, but someone would try to beat him up the first time he tried to leave the penthouse in it.
“That’s not really your color,” Mercy stated, Kon looked over at her. Because for Mercy that had been surprisingly sarcastic, there’d been a really long time where Kon had thought that any emotions that Mercy or any other of the people that Lex surrounded himself with had were piped into them directly by some master computer of Lex’s that he’d never found.
“I was thinking for a present for Lex, for his birthday,” Kon said brightly.
He watched in amazement as Mercy’s mouth almost twisted into a smile as she stared at him.
It had taken him six months to get Mercy to break.
“Cassie is over in the far corner by cosmetics,” he relaxed his hands on the hanger, the cashiers tended to get tetchy if you shoved broken stuff at them. Even if you were paying for it, because he was getting the damn shirt, Lex’s birthday was in a couple of weeks and just because he’d given up years ago trying to figure out what the perfect present for him was didn’t mean that he shouldn’t get him something.
Besides he didn’t think a perfect gift for Lex existed anyway, he was pretty sure you couldn’t give someone a planet after all.
And he already had Superman, though he was almost positive that he couldn’t convince Clark to put a bow around his neck.
Kon shied away, immediately away from those thoughts. It was one thing to know that your parents weren’t exactly playing Scrabble behind closed doors; it was another to actually know what they were doing.
Maybe he could get this Lex to line his room with lead. The first time his superhearing had kicked in it had been almost the first thing Lex had done, after Lex had tested his range.
He forced himself to relax, deep breaths as he walked back, shirt in hand, back to where they’d left their cart. “Bart’s over by shoes.”
“We should leave,” Mercy said, and tone of her voice indicated that if he disagreed with her that she had no problem knocking him on his ass and throwing him over her shoulder.
“They’re not here to hurt me,” he tapped his fingers against the cart handle. “They’re just watching.”
“Still.”
“I’m not leaving without clothes, and I still need shoes,” and he had to talk to them eventually. He would just have to continue to remind himself that this wasn’t his Tim and Cassie, this Tim and Cassie hadn’t done anything wrong, they hadn’t betrayed him, this Tim and Cassie had missed him and his refusal to even talk to them had hurt them.
And he had no problems with Dick or Bart. At the end Dick hadn’t even wanted to cut out his heart because of Tim. If things got too intense with Tim and Cassie he could always focus on the two of them until he didn’t want to curl up into a tiny ball and die.
He looked around the store, making sure to meet their eyes this time. Dick smiled ruefully; Bart looked amused, Cassie hopeful and Tim… well Tim didn’t look like anything but the first thing that Kon had dedicated his time to upon meeting Tim was figuring out what his non-expressions meant and there was hope there too.
They needed to get the first conversation over with, and maybe in a public place nobody would cry or make a scene.
Maybe he would even participate in the conversation without reminding them that he wasn’t their Kon and they weren’t his friends.
******************************************************************************
He’d set up his laptop in the living room and had the TV on, turned down low for background noise.
Kon had been gone for two hours and Clark wondered how long it took to pick out a couple pairs of jeans, some t-shirts. He wondered why Lex hadn’t just sent someone to pick those things up for Kon.
“You don’t need to stay,” Lex said when he walked into the living room and saw him sitting there.
Clark hadn’t even been sure he was still in the penthouse, there were only so many rooms after all and now that he was thinking it he had visions of a secret lab with hidden doors just waiting for him and Kon to lower their guard so Lex could knock them out and drag them inside.
Clark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.
“Really, when Kon’s not here, you don’t need to stay,” Lex said again, more forcefully.
“I wouldn’t put it past you to lock me out if I left,” Clark said mildly.
“Are we going to fight?” Lex sounded slightly more gleeful then Clark would have liked. Probably he had visions of Clark picking a fight and he thought he knew Lex well enough that he could safely say that Lex would have Kryptonite hidden somewhere around the room.
The vase over in the corner looked suspicious, and not at all like something Lex would buy. Clark wouldn’t put it past him to have some stuffed inside something that he wouldn’t mind breaking over Clark’s head.
“You said that you would tell me what else you saw,” Clark reminded him. It would be easier to have this conversation without Kon in the next room listening in without meaning to.
He was half distracted by the fact that there was an article showing up on the Daily Planet website about Kon’s return, by-line by Lois Lane and Clark spent a half a second trying to figure out who had given her whatever facts she used, before he realized that it was almost entirely comprised of supposition and there were no facts to speak of.
Except for the picture accompanying the article of him and Lex, with Kon between them being ushered into the building.
He glanced over at his coat, his cell was off and in his pocket and he imagined that there were probably a hundred and fifty thousand messages from Lois in varying degrees of anger and petulance waiting for him when he finally turned it back on.
Maybe he could just drop it in the ocean somewhere and have someone from the League handle whatever interviews needed to be dealt with.
Especially since he was in the middle of Family Leave after all.
“There was really nothing else, I saw Kon in his room, talking with Tim on the phone,” Clark looked up at him in surprise because he honestly hadn’t thought that Lex would tell him anything. He’d figured that Lex would keep whatever he’d seen to himself to be used as blackmail to get Clark to leave the penthouse eventually.
“I saw Tim come to visit him once, after their split obviously because Kon wouldn’t even talk to him, would barely acknowledge him…”
“So you know that Tim and Cassie and Kon were…” Clark waved his hand around, because how did you ask your son’s other father if he knew that his son had been involved in a three-way relationship that had ended badly.
Lex narrowed his eyes at him and stared at him like he was the biggest idiot to monopolize his couch.
“Yes I know about Kon’s relationship with them,” Lex said slowly. “I also know that there was something that didn’t sit right about the entire thing with my counterpart.”
“You think they were manipulated?”
“I think that when you have Batman and Wonder Woman actively trying to break them up that three teenagers didn’t stand a chance in hell of staying together.”
Clark nodded in understanding. When his Bruce and Diana teamed up together they were a formidable pair, he didn’t think they’d be any different in an alternate universe.
Just like he didn’t believe that however much Kon, Tim and Cassie might have professed to love each other, that love wouldn’t have been enough under the weight of that alliance.
“What else?”
Lex walked over to the window, back turned toward him.
“That was all I saw.”
“But not all you know.”
Lex sighed. “You know that Kon was fifteen when he broke out of Cadmus the first time, right after your… death.”
“Yes…”
“He was twelve there,” Clark stared at his back.
“Twelve?” he asked faintly. He’d been a child.
Lex turned around to face him once more, nodding.
“Twelve, your counterpart demanded all sorts of tests that you never did here. You were a bit more… well you had more common sense at least, were more demanding. You found out just months after his appearance who he was cloned from, I found out shortly after that when you tried to kill me I imagine. I don’t know exactly what was said or how it was decided but there was a custody agreement drawn up that stated that we would share custody fifty/fifty.”
“He was a child,” Clark whispered. The first vision of Kon that he’d had in his apartment; how he’d looked so young… younger then Clark remembered him made much more sense.
Because Kon had been younger, had been a pre-teen shuffled between parents until those parents… his brain shorted out at that point.
Because in no universe could he imagine a world where he and Lex could forge a truce that would allow them to be lovers.
“You saw a lot more then I did.” And he’d been right that Lex had gotten all the family stuff and he felt that surge of jealousy again.
Because he’d gotten one image of Kon before his world had been torn apart and Lex had gotten all the rest of the good stuff.
“I think I needed it more then you did.”
Clark snorted and Lex looked amused when he looked over at him.
“I got death and destruction and you got all the good stuff,” he knew he sounded petulant and whiny, he couldn’t help himself. He might as well be stomping his feet and pouting while he was at it, just to complete the image of ‘teen in a fit of temper’.
“I needed it more,” Lex repeated. “You already had a relationship with Kon,” crappy as it might have been, was left unsaid but Clark heard it loud and clear. “I had nothing, if we were going to be what Kon needed us to be… I needed it more.”
Clark would have said something to that, but the door opened and Kon walked in looking like he’d been told all over again that his world was gone and his family and friends were all dead.
“I’m going to my room,” he said sullenly, he didn’t look at either one of them and when they heard his door click shut they both looked back over at Mercy.
Who looked like she would rather be anywhere but where she was at that moment.
“We got ambushed at the store,” she said simply and then people started bring bags in and Clark got distracted trying to figure out how Kon could have bought this much stuff in under two hours.
******************************************************************************
Part 4
Clark wondered why Lex had managed to get all the family stuff and Clark had gotten death and destruction. It really wasn’t fair.
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Read this Part 1 and this Part 2 first.
TITLE: The Other Side – 3/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex, Alt Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 3
Lex had a room ready for Kon. Clark wasn’t sure why he was surprised, he’d spent an entire week watching Kon interact with Lex in the same manner that Clark could remember interacting with his father.
He kept thinking he should be happy that Kon’s relationship with Lex didn’t mimic Lex’s with Lionel, but in the back of his mind he thought that maybe it would be easier for him if Kon and Lex had been trying to stab each other in the back.
And it wasn’t like Kon didn’t interact in the same manner with him, because he did. This Kon was used to treating Lex and Clark as his parental figures (even if he didn’t call them dad and dad) and it appeared to be something he just couldn’t shut off just because Lex and Clark weren’t his Lex and Clark.
When it had become obvious that Kon was as healed as he was going to get Lex had announced that Kon would be coming home with him. And there was nothing he could say (besides subtle reminders that this wasn’t Kon’s world and maybe he wanted to not go with a Lex that he didn’t know the first thing about) when Kon acted like it was perfectly normal for Lex to want him to go home with him and for him to want to go home with Lex.
Clark went with them, because one lecture from Bruce about his lack of intelligence in regards to Lex Luthor and Kon was his limit for the year.
Mercy met them when they landed, all three in civilian clothes and though she turned her nose up at Clark she didn’t try to kill him so Clark was taking that for a success.
The other shoe would drop eventually and Lex would go back to trying to take over the world and Clark would go back to stopping him from doing so and Kon would unfortunately be caught in the middle.
A short drive to the penthouse and it had been a long time since Clark had been there as anything besides Lex’s enemy; he recognized absolutely nothing when they entered. Kon already looked like he’d had enough with dealing with the two of them being silent at each other and Clark wanted to tell him to get used to it because it had been almost 15 years since he and Lex had been able to be even remotely civil to one another.
When Lex led him to a room that was obviously supposed to be his a slight smile appeared on his face, the first one that had crossed it in days and Clark hadn’t realized how much he’d become used to Kon smiling and being comfortable with them until he wasn’t anymore.
Right now Kon looked relaxed and if not happy then sort of relieved, sort of like he felt when he got to go back to the farm… like he was home or at least in a place that he recognized as home.
Clark wondered why Lex had managed to get all the family stuff and Clark had gotten death and destruction. It really wasn’t fair.
He closed the door, a flimsy barrier between him and a Lex and Clark that wanted to help him but weren’t the family he wanted.
“You don’t need to stay,” Lex said finally, one last glance at the closed door before he sighed and walked towards the living room.
“I don’t have anywhere else to be,” Clark followed him, and he didn’t. Because his name had been removed from the JLA roster and his only assignment as Superman was to figure out how to handle a Kon-El that hadn’t seen anything wrong with leaving the Watchtower with Lex Luthor.
Batman was thinking brainwashing, but seeing as how Clark had only left Kon and Lex alone for five minutes he thought it near impossible that it could be that.
“You mean you don’t trust me alone with Kon,” Lex poured himself a drink, taking a sip and looking at Clark over the rim of the glass. He pointedly didn’t offer anything to him and Clark had to bite his tongue to say something snide about manners and guests.
“Well really, do you blame me?” Clark glanced back at the closed door. As long as he’d known Lex the other man had normally had four plans, three of which they would know about and then the fourth would be pulled out of nowhere to smack him upside the head with Kryptonite at the most inopportune moment.
“You were never interested in him before; excuse me for thinking that you might have ulterior motives.”
“You seemed to be screwing him up enough for the both of us,” Lex retorted.
“Do we have to fight every single time we’re in the same room? Can’t we just agree that Kon needs both of us, expects to have both of us without being at each others throats.”
“Well maybe if you’d stop picking them we wouldn’t fight all the time, I never wanted to fight with you Clark. Superman yes, you no.”
“You can’t fight with just one of us. We’re the same person,” Clark ground his teeth, it was like having that conversation with Lois all over again, the one where she didn’t understand why she couldn’t just love Superman and think Clark was an idiot.
He was also frustrated and angry and worried that Kon was going to try and flee out the window when he heard them arguing.
“You’re human, you make mistakes. Superman is… not human.”
They always had the same fight, every single time. He could probably recite it and save Lex the energy from having to spout the same words out.
Superman was an alien, Superman had no reason to want to help the human race and was obviously just lulling them into a false sense of security so that he could take over the planet with little to no resistance.
Batman had felt that way at one point, might still for all he knew. He did know that Batman had a half a dozen ways to stop him if he tried; if Bruce and Lex could work together they might actually be able to destroy him if he ever went insane.
But they couldn’t, and they would never need to. Because Clark had spent a lot of time making sure that he couldn’t fulfill his father’s purpose for sending him to Earth.
“Were they even able to be in the same room without fighting all the time,” he wondered out loud. Lex glanced over at him.
“They were lovers, Clark.”
“I kind of figured that out all by myself, I’m not an idiot,” Lex looked like he wanted to argue with him about that fact. “That doesn’t automatically mean that they weren’t fighting every single other moment they spent together.”
Lex looked away from him.
“They came to terms that allowed them to peacefully co-exist without forcing Kon to choose between them.”
“Well that’s really vague.”
“I don’t know Clark. I never saw whatever conversation they had that allowed them their truce. Sometimes I wish I had,” the last sentence was barely breathed. If he’d been anyone else he wouldn’t have heard it.
“What do we need to do? To make him comfortable here, to allow him to trust us.”
Lex looked back at him, eyes piercing and intent, like he could judge Clark’s intent purely by his gaze alone.
“Well first, we need to be able to be in the same room without fighting all the time.”
“So what? We forget the past happened and try to be friends again?” Off the top of his head he could think of three people that would think that he had been the one brainwashed.
“We were able to be friends once; we could at least try and be civil to one another. I tell you that I won’t try and take over the world and you tell me that you won’t watch me like you expect me to do that at any possible moment.”
“Should we put that in writing? Because no one is going to believe this.”
The bed was identical to his, the furniture, the pictures, the mess he’d left on the floor before the world had fallen apart. If he didn’t know better he would think that he was home.
But he wasn’t.
The Lex and Clark here were trying to be quiet, but Kon could hear them arguing two rooms over and he wondered how they’d been raising their Kon if they couldn’t even have one civil conversation. He didn’t want to wonder what had happened to his counterpart, because it was kind of obvious that he was gone.
Probably dead.
He laid back on the bed, new sheets and new pillows and he was really sure that their Kon had never stayed in this room, not once… because nothing was broke in.
And everything smelled new and unused, like it had when he’d first gone to live with Lex. When he’d been young and scared and really unsure as to whether this was even a smart move.
It had all turned out all right but that first night he hadn’t slept, instead he’d sat in the middle of his bed the entire night waiting for an attack that he was sure was going to come the minute that he’d let his guard down.
He’d found out later that Superman had flown around the penthouse the entire night waiting for the very same thing.
But no attack had come and it had taken a few days more before they’d all relaxed.
It had taken a year before he stopped wondering if he let his guard down too much if Lex was going to dissect him in a lab. Another six months past that when he’d started to think of Lex as his father, even though he never called him that to his face.
He’d trusted Lex a lot sooner then Clark had, but then Clark had a lot more years of actual history and anger and hatred to work past.
He turned over on his side on the bed, staring at the picture on his nightstand. It was one of Young Justice, him and Bart and Tim and Cassie and Cissie looking unbearably young and innocent.
He wondered where this Lex had gotten it from. Because if it was pretty obvious that his counterpart had never stepped foot into this room, then there was no reason for Lex to have this picture in the first place, the him that had been here might possibly have never even had the picture in the first place.
Things could have been vastly different here from what his world had been like.
His gaze locked on Tim and Cassie’s faces. Cassie had a wide, happy grin. Tim didn’t look as stoic as he normally did though you really had to look to see any sort of expression.
He’d loved them more then he’d loved anything else in his life. His heart still hurt to think about the betrayal, images flashing through his mind like snapshots. Images of them wrapped in each other looking up at him in dismay and shock…
They’d known that it had been wrong; they’d tried to apologize, tried using pretty words that he couldn’t even remember anymore… all he’d only been able to think of was how many times they had done it when he hadn’t been around to catch them and wondered when they’d been planning on telling him.
Or if they were just going to let him continue thinking that everything was okay, when really they hadn’t wanted anything to do with him anymore.
He’d thought he’d buried any feelings that he’d had for them, but his heart and soul had ached at seeing Tim’s body broken and mangled, ached at holding Cassie in his arms, looking up at him in the last seconds of her life telling him that they’d love him forever.
He’d screamed his heartache to the heavens, tears streaming down his face, seconds later he’d gotten the call from the Fortress. The A.I. panicked and screeching as Doomsday had obliterated it.
Had killed Lex immediately because when he’d gotten to the Fortress the only heartbeat that he’d heard was Superman’s, the only sound he’d heard was Clark’s whispering, softly to Lex even though the other man was dead and…
He wiped a hand across his face and wondered where the tears were coming from.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered and he didn’t know who he was apologizing to.
He was alive, but his world was gone.
Donna and Dick and Bart and Connor were all gone. The last people that he’d ever fought with and at the end he’d not even wanted to fight.
He’d been all for just curling up in a ball on Superman’s bed and waiting for Doomsday to destroy the Tower because he’d already lost everything that he’d ever cared about, everything that would have made fighting worth it.
Because Cassie and Tim were gone, there would be no forgiveness given or received.
Clark and Lex were gone; there was no family for him to take comfort in.
Superman gone, Supergirl gone. He had been the last of his kind and he’d only been a half-blood Kryptonian as it was.
They were all here though, all those people that he would have been willing to fight for, willing to die for were here, he knew that.
But this Cassie and Tim didn’t know him. This Clark and Lex didn’t know how to interact with him and he wondered again what their relationships with his counterpart had been like.
Had this Kon had a family?
Or had he been as utterly alone as Kon now felt.
The scene that he walked into was so eerily familiar that for a whole ten seconds Kon thought he might be able to fool himself into believing that everything had been a horrible nightmare.
Lex was sitting in his chair, coffee in front of him, toast sitting on a plate untouched, paper open.
Clark was sitting in his chair, two glasses; one with orange juice, one with milk and a full plate of eggs and potatoes and bacon that he was busily working his way through. At his elbow was his copy of the Daily Planet and they were having an argument that Kon had heard almost every other morning for all the years that he’d been alive.
“Good morning Kon,” Lex noticed him first and that was when he was reminded that this wasn’t his parents or his world. Because Lex looked away from Clark and focused on Kon and that had very rarely happened unless he was in trouble.
“Morning,” he mumbled, sliding into his chair and there was a glass of milk already there him and Becky (who’d always been their cook so he spared a smile for her, because familiar face) slid a plate filled similarly to the one Clark was finishing in front of him.
“Did you sleep okay?” Clark set his fork down, tapped his finger against the edge of his glass of milk and stared at him intently.
Kon stared at his plate, shifting uncomfortably, because it had been a long time since he’d sat a table with a Clark and Lex that were trying too hard to be a family.
“Fine,” he muttered, he nibbled on slice of bacon even though he wasn’t hungry.
“That shield thing that you used against us in the Watchtower,” Lex said suddenly. “How did you do that?”
Kon looked up at him, and wondered who the Kon here had been. The first thing he’d done, that they’d done was figure out his powers.
“It’s the T.T…”
“Tactile Telekinesis,” Clark offered quietly.
“I’m quite aware of what Kon’s abilities are,” Lex glared at him.
Kon cleared his throat, “I can use it to kind of push things away if I want, kind of like a shield. Tim…” he stopped. Because Tim had been the one that helped him work through his powers one by one until they figured out what all his limitations were and then they’d pushed further because Tim had thought that with training he could use them for even more.
“Tim helped you develop on your powers?” Lex looked surprised. Like he’d thought that he’d been the one that would have helped him and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell them that Lex had fought him being in any way involved in super-hero politics before he turned 18 and had lost (and not graciously either).
Because half of him may have been Lex, but the other half was Clark and he’d gotten all the parts of Clark that said that he had powers for a reason and that he just couldn’t sit around and wait to turn 18 to use them to help people.
He didn’t tell them that at the beginning Tim hadn’t been helping him because he’d wanted to, he’d been helping him at first because Batman had wanted to know what Kon’s limitations were so he could determine a way to stop him if he went bad.
Because he’d been half Lex Luthor and the cape community had all know that. For most of them Lex Luthor meant evil personified and anyone that shared his blood was bound to try and destroy the world at some point.
He glanced over at Clark and decided that either Clark had figured that out already (it had taken him/them much longer before) or his breakfast wasn’t sitting well with him.
He wanted to tell him not to worry about it. That he hadn’t blamed Batman or Robin, still didn’t.
And they’d been able to use the information that Tim had gotten from that exercise to shut Match down when he’d appeared, if they hadn’t Match would have done a lot more damage then what he’d ended up doing.
It wouldn’t make any difference what he said though, it hadn’t back then. Superman would still end up having words with Batman, they might have the same argument and might not talk for a few months like Clark and Bruce had originally.
But they would end up working it out and they’d go back to being the World’s Finest and him and this Tim might have the same laugh that he’d had with his about the fact that eventually the World’s Finest… well that might some day be them.
He was being watched.
He could feel eyes focused on his back and he could feel Mercy getting twitchy beside him. From past experience he knew that she was seconds away from pulling her gun and hustling him away.
He needed clothes though, the ones that Lex had filled his closet with were okay, but he couldn’t believe that their Kon would have been caught dead in them.
Dress pants and dress shirts in every color of the rainbow, blazers and dress shoes and there wasn’t a pair of jeans or t-shirt to be found.
“We’re being watched,” Mercy said quietly, her lips didn’t move and her expression didn’t change. When Kon had first met her he’d spent days trying to figure out how she did that.
“I know,” Kon paused looking through the rack, glanced back at the cart that was half full and rolled his shoulders.
He hated shopping, with a passion. But this experience was hands down better then the first time he’d had to do this.
Then Clark and Lex had accompanied him…
…because god forbid he go somewhere by himself, someone might walk off with him and he snorted in his head just like he’d snorted out loud back then.
Because, hello?
Superpowers.
So back then Clark and Lex had come with him and then had proceeded to spend the majority of the time bickering over what exactly proper clothing for him had been, he’d tuned them out and just tossed stuff that made both of them cringe into the hands of the store employees that Lex had commandeered.
It had been the only fun he had that day.
“Tim and Dick,” he said quietly. He pulled a shirt out just so he could snort at it. Lex would wear it, but someone would try to beat him up the first time he tried to leave the penthouse in it.
“That’s not really your color,” Mercy stated, Kon looked over at her. Because for Mercy that had been surprisingly sarcastic, there’d been a really long time where Kon had thought that any emotions that Mercy or any other of the people that Lex surrounded himself with had were piped into them directly by some master computer of Lex’s that he’d never found.
“I was thinking for a present for Lex, for his birthday,” Kon said brightly.
He watched in amazement as Mercy’s mouth almost twisted into a smile as she stared at him.
It had taken him six months to get Mercy to break.
“Cassie is over in the far corner by cosmetics,” he relaxed his hands on the hanger, the cashiers tended to get tetchy if you shoved broken stuff at them. Even if you were paying for it, because he was getting the damn shirt, Lex’s birthday was in a couple of weeks and just because he’d given up years ago trying to figure out what the perfect present for him was didn’t mean that he shouldn’t get him something.
Besides he didn’t think a perfect gift for Lex existed anyway, he was pretty sure you couldn’t give someone a planet after all.
And he already had Superman, though he was almost positive that he couldn’t convince Clark to put a bow around his neck.
Kon shied away, immediately away from those thoughts. It was one thing to know that your parents weren’t exactly playing Scrabble behind closed doors; it was another to actually know what they were doing.
Maybe he could get this Lex to line his room with lead. The first time his superhearing had kicked in it had been almost the first thing Lex had done, after Lex had tested his range.
He forced himself to relax, deep breaths as he walked back, shirt in hand, back to where they’d left their cart. “Bart’s over by shoes.”
“We should leave,” Mercy said, and tone of her voice indicated that if he disagreed with her that she had no problem knocking him on his ass and throwing him over her shoulder.
“They’re not here to hurt me,” he tapped his fingers against the cart handle. “They’re just watching.”
“Still.”
“I’m not leaving without clothes, and I still need shoes,” and he had to talk to them eventually. He would just have to continue to remind himself that this wasn’t his Tim and Cassie, this Tim and Cassie hadn’t done anything wrong, they hadn’t betrayed him, this Tim and Cassie had missed him and his refusal to even talk to them had hurt them.
And he had no problems with Dick or Bart. At the end Dick hadn’t even wanted to cut out his heart because of Tim. If things got too intense with Tim and Cassie he could always focus on the two of them until he didn’t want to curl up into a tiny ball and die.
He looked around the store, making sure to meet their eyes this time. Dick smiled ruefully; Bart looked amused, Cassie hopeful and Tim… well Tim didn’t look like anything but the first thing that Kon had dedicated his time to upon meeting Tim was figuring out what his non-expressions meant and there was hope there too.
They needed to get the first conversation over with, and maybe in a public place nobody would cry or make a scene.
Maybe he would even participate in the conversation without reminding them that he wasn’t their Kon and they weren’t his friends.
He’d set up his laptop in the living room and had the TV on, turned down low for background noise.
Kon had been gone for two hours and Clark wondered how long it took to pick out a couple pairs of jeans, some t-shirts. He wondered why Lex hadn’t just sent someone to pick those things up for Kon.
“You don’t need to stay,” Lex said when he walked into the living room and saw him sitting there.
Clark hadn’t even been sure he was still in the penthouse, there were only so many rooms after all and now that he was thinking it he had visions of a secret lab with hidden doors just waiting for him and Kon to lower their guard so Lex could knock them out and drag them inside.
Clark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.
“Really, when Kon’s not here, you don’t need to stay,” Lex said again, more forcefully.
“I wouldn’t put it past you to lock me out if I left,” Clark said mildly.
“Are we going to fight?” Lex sounded slightly more gleeful then Clark would have liked. Probably he had visions of Clark picking a fight and he thought he knew Lex well enough that he could safely say that Lex would have Kryptonite hidden somewhere around the room.
The vase over in the corner looked suspicious, and not at all like something Lex would buy. Clark wouldn’t put it past him to have some stuffed inside something that he wouldn’t mind breaking over Clark’s head.
“You said that you would tell me what else you saw,” Clark reminded him. It would be easier to have this conversation without Kon in the next room listening in without meaning to.
He was half distracted by the fact that there was an article showing up on the Daily Planet website about Kon’s return, by-line by Lois Lane and Clark spent a half a second trying to figure out who had given her whatever facts she used, before he realized that it was almost entirely comprised of supposition and there were no facts to speak of.
Except for the picture accompanying the article of him and Lex, with Kon between them being ushered into the building.
He glanced over at his coat, his cell was off and in his pocket and he imagined that there were probably a hundred and fifty thousand messages from Lois in varying degrees of anger and petulance waiting for him when he finally turned it back on.
Maybe he could just drop it in the ocean somewhere and have someone from the League handle whatever interviews needed to be dealt with.
Especially since he was in the middle of Family Leave after all.
“There was really nothing else, I saw Kon in his room, talking with Tim on the phone,” Clark looked up at him in surprise because he honestly hadn’t thought that Lex would tell him anything. He’d figured that Lex would keep whatever he’d seen to himself to be used as blackmail to get Clark to leave the penthouse eventually.
“I saw Tim come to visit him once, after their split obviously because Kon wouldn’t even talk to him, would barely acknowledge him…”
“So you know that Tim and Cassie and Kon were…” Clark waved his hand around, because how did you ask your son’s other father if he knew that his son had been involved in a three-way relationship that had ended badly.
Lex narrowed his eyes at him and stared at him like he was the biggest idiot to monopolize his couch.
“Yes I know about Kon’s relationship with them,” Lex said slowly. “I also know that there was something that didn’t sit right about the entire thing with my counterpart.”
“You think they were manipulated?”
“I think that when you have Batman and Wonder Woman actively trying to break them up that three teenagers didn’t stand a chance in hell of staying together.”
Clark nodded in understanding. When his Bruce and Diana teamed up together they were a formidable pair, he didn’t think they’d be any different in an alternate universe.
Just like he didn’t believe that however much Kon, Tim and Cassie might have professed to love each other, that love wouldn’t have been enough under the weight of that alliance.
“What else?”
Lex walked over to the window, back turned toward him.
“That was all I saw.”
“But not all you know.”
Lex sighed. “You know that Kon was fifteen when he broke out of Cadmus the first time, right after your… death.”
“Yes…”
“He was twelve there,” Clark stared at his back.
“Twelve?” he asked faintly. He’d been a child.
Lex turned around to face him once more, nodding.
“Twelve, your counterpart demanded all sorts of tests that you never did here. You were a bit more… well you had more common sense at least, were more demanding. You found out just months after his appearance who he was cloned from, I found out shortly after that when you tried to kill me I imagine. I don’t know exactly what was said or how it was decided but there was a custody agreement drawn up that stated that we would share custody fifty/fifty.”
“He was a child,” Clark whispered. The first vision of Kon that he’d had in his apartment; how he’d looked so young… younger then Clark remembered him made much more sense.
Because Kon had been younger, had been a pre-teen shuffled between parents until those parents… his brain shorted out at that point.
Because in no universe could he imagine a world where he and Lex could forge a truce that would allow them to be lovers.
“You saw a lot more then I did.” And he’d been right that Lex had gotten all the family stuff and he felt that surge of jealousy again.
Because he’d gotten one image of Kon before his world had been torn apart and Lex had gotten all the rest of the good stuff.
“I think I needed it more then you did.”
Clark snorted and Lex looked amused when he looked over at him.
“I got death and destruction and you got all the good stuff,” he knew he sounded petulant and whiny, he couldn’t help himself. He might as well be stomping his feet and pouting while he was at it, just to complete the image of ‘teen in a fit of temper’.
“I needed it more,” Lex repeated. “You already had a relationship with Kon,” crappy as it might have been, was left unsaid but Clark heard it loud and clear. “I had nothing, if we were going to be what Kon needed us to be… I needed it more.”
Clark would have said something to that, but the door opened and Kon walked in looking like he’d been told all over again that his world was gone and his family and friends were all dead.
“I’m going to my room,” he said sullenly, he didn’t look at either one of them and when they heard his door click shut they both looked back over at Mercy.
Who looked like she would rather be anywhere but where she was at that moment.
“We got ambushed at the store,” she said simply and then people started bring bags in and Clark got distracted trying to figure out how Kon could have bought this much stuff in under two hours.
Part 4
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-02 10:18 pm (UTC)“I got death and destruction and you got all the good stuff,” he knew he sounded petulant and whiny, he couldn’t help himself. He might as well be stomping his feet and pouting while he was at it, just to complete the image of ‘teen in a fit of temper’.
“I needed it more,” Lex repeated. “You already had a relationship with Kon,” crappy as it might have been, was left unsaid but Clark heard it loud and clear. “I had nothing, if we were going to be what Kon needed us to be… I needed it more.”
Awwwww.
I still adore your Clark, and I am really beginning to adore your Lex, as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-28 01:41 pm (UTC)And yes Lex was right he really did need it moore than Clark did.
Awwwww poor Kon it must be a hard mindfuck to see all the people he knew have died alive and stalking him, not to mention the fallout from his relationship with Tim and Cassie.
And yesssssss we got Mercy. She in fics makes me always happy.
annakas