Clark Luthor's Adventures in Wonderland: Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Clark smirked as Sullivan finished with her opponent. The first time they'd patrolled together, he'd made the mistake of trying to finish for her, to offer a hand when he was through his own mugger or thief. She'd rounded on him after he'd helped and blasted him with her damn empathy power until he'd fallen to his knees. He still hadn't been able to really feel his fingers for an hour after her stunt. After that, he knew well enough that she could hold her own. Actually, she was magnificent to watch. Sullivan was small, almost a foot shorter than he was, but she moved with surprising speed for a human and her blows were always efficient and brutal.

It probably said a lot about his reformed status that it turned him on fiercely any time she broke bone.

Tonight, she hadn't but the rapist they'd stumbled into would still be eating through a straw. She'd knocked out enough teeth for that.

Finally, once she'd secured him next to his associate with riot cuffs, Sullivan stood and shrugged up at him. "It's about five and the sun will be up in an hour. I think we've done enough for tonight."

He nodded and quirked his head at her. "You want a lift, Frankenstein?"

She narrowed her eyes at him but shook her head. They never called each other by their first names. To him, she was Sullivan when he was feeling charitable, but more often than not "Frankenstein" worked. It was apt. Her power, the weird empathy vibe of hers, allowed her to heal herself and others. Horrible catch-22 of it was that she didn't look pretty patched back together. Since she'd been sixteen, Chloe Sullivan was a network of scars and burns. Of course, lest he seem like an ass, it wasn't like the bitch didn't return the favor. It was rare the days when he heard "Luthor" from her lips.

It was almost always "alien," and, to be fair, that was what he was. Everyone on the planet knew that and knew it well.

Somehow, as harsh as it sounded, he liked that. They didn't have any illusions with each other. They were what they were.

"It's fine. I'll see you back at headquarters. I have some food and if you want to grab breakfast before you go home, you can. I have extra Tabasco even for the waffles." She snickered.

He could see the mirth rising in those sharp green eyes of hers. It was the only part of her body besides her mouth visible. It didn't matter if it were July, Sullivan wore a long black over shirt and black jeans with a ski mask to patrol.

"Fine then, I'll wait," he said, before blurring off to their, well lair sounded bad, but their rendezvous point.

As he did, he tried to ignore how much it was starting to bug him that she wouldn't just get over it and let him carry her for fun. She would only if it was the fastest and most expedient way to an emergency and Clark still had no idea why. Frankly, where Sullivan was concerned, he had little understanding of everything. Even after a year, she remained inscrutable.

"You know," he said, in between bites of waffles. There were some things breeding never stopped affecting. He'd been raised to be the heir to Lionel Luthor's fortune, or he always thought he had been. It turned out he'd always been more slave than son, the pet Lionel brought home and tried to destroy in fear it was going feral.

Clark wasn't sure Lionel was completely wrong about that some days.

Still, he could be a rude, sarcastic bastard when he wanted to be and often was. However, he still knew all that Metropolis high society crap. He'd seen more operas than a twenty something guy should have to, had eaten using every silverware utensil imaginable, and could waltz. Golf too but that came easily. Anything sports-wise was simple. He'd been educated to be the perfect scion and some of those things were still in him, same as the blood lust or his anger.

He just ignored them more often than not.

However, while Sullivan was busy shoving things in with her fingers, he'd felt like a napkin and silverware. So sue him.

"I know what?" she asked, her gaze intense as always.

Clark kept cutting and hated that it got harder every day not to flinch when he saw her. Sullivan was as bald as his late brother had been, albeit for different reasons. The shower had done that to Lex, and he'd done it to Sullivan. She'd been too close on his father's trail and Clark had been ordered to make her disappear. He'd set fire to her house and after the explosion had ripped her apart, her body had, thanks to her meteor power, sewn itself back together as well as it could. That meant the odd crisscrossing of scars all over her body, the patches of burned skin on her back and legs, as well as no hair left on her scalp.

He'd ruined her, but, to be fair, he'd killed hundreds of people. It kept him from sleeping much if at all. It was just that Sullivan was the only one he ate breakfast with most days.

Still, those eyes were beautiful, always thinking and sparkling sharply like emeralds. Once in a blue moon she'd smile too, and he'd almost be able to see what she would have been like. What she should be if he hadn't ruined her too along with most of Smallville and Metropolis.

"Alien, I don't like repeating myself," she said, as she finished her final waffle.

"Well, Frankenstein, I was thinking that as much as I love patrol."

She smirked at that. "An interesting way to put voluntarily cleaning up the filth of the five boroughs at three a.m."

"No less true. I'm violent. I don't hide that, and I don't think I could change it if I wanted to. I like that I have an outlet."

Sullivan nodded and leaned back in her chair, slipping off her shirt as she did it. Clark almost lost his composure at the even larger network of cicatrixes crossing over her arms and shoulders. "You're a psychopath. I mean, considering what Lionel did, it's not a shock at all. But you do good work for our team. You're probably still more stable than that Bat-guy in Gotham. Yeesh, what's his deal?"

"Who knows," Clark replied, laughing a little. "Look, I love patrol like I said, and we've done a lot for New York, but I'm so fucking stir crazy. Don't you ever get bored?"

Sullivan shrugged. "I have a mission. Crime's never going to stop here, and we're finally getting our own meta problem. Frankly, we're always busy. What's there to be bored over?"

He set down his utensils and crossed his arms over his chest. "I sleep in my penthouse-"

"That sounds hard."

"Lionel's money shouldn't go to waste," he countered. "The point is that I crash at my place, come here, and we patrol and it's on a loop. I'm bored out of my mind. You ever hear of burn out?"

"You take a few days off a month."

"Do you?"

"I like to keep busy," she said. "Besides, what are you angling at?"

"We should go out," he said and then quickly floundered for something else to say so it didn't sound like a pick up line. "I mean away from either a dark alley or a sewer."

Sullivan laughed. "You're the most wanted felon on the damn planet, and I don't do 'out.' If I get bored, which I don't usually, I go to see J'onn at his place."

Clark frowned at that. He'd never known that and J'onn had never mentioned it either. That stung. He assumed Sullivan's refusal to even come back to his place for a movie or just to do something more normal was because he was an alien, but J'onn Jones was no more human than Clark, not really. Apparently some huge three alarm fire years ago had burned out his powers (Martians and fire got along like he and Kryptonite), but he wasn't of Earth any more than Clark was.

Hell, the way he heard it, even if J'onn couldn't assume his natural shape, Martians were red eyed and seven feet tall.

Ugh.

"No, I'm serious. So we don't go out in New York. I speak twelve languages. We pick some place where no one even cares if I show up there. I have the stupid glasses and such. We just go to some remote place in Italy or Bulgaria, problem solved."

"You know those countries have TV, right? Besides, glasses aren't magical."

"I can play nebbish. Crime won't end the Big Apple in one night. That's why there are cops."

Sullivan sighed and set her hands on her lap. "Why is this so important to you?"

"I used to have a busy life outside of Dad's wet works, okay?"

She snorted. "Everyone knows how many models and starlets and gymnasts and I don't even know what you bedded."

"True, but that was just fun. It didn't mean anything," he stopped then and took a deep breath. He'd known that his sister, Tess, had been dead for over a year. Bitch of Oliver Queen killing Lionel first was that he'd never have the pleasure for what he'd done to his sister and, yes, the love of his life. He was a Luthor; they were allowed to be fucked up. Hell, Dad was always going on about dead Romans; wasn't that very Caligula of him anyway? "But I still went to plays and sports events and balls and etc."

"I'm sorry, Lord Luthor, we don't have that here."

"I'm not saying the Ritz, Chloe, Jesus. I just meant something in some daylight."

She blinked at him, and he replayed what he'd said.

Oh.

"This really matters to you?"

"I'm getting cabin fever. Come on, we try it once. If anything goes wrong, you give me an 'I told you so' and then we never do it again. Pick any place you want, anywhere in the whole damn world and I'll take you just for the afternoon."

Sullivan eyed him warily, and he worried he was coming off as too desperate. God would Dad have had a lecture for that too. Luthors don't beg son. Lex had and very loudly, Clark might add. Still, he wasn't too obvious, was he?

"Anywhere?"

"I promise. Name it."

She shook her head. "Clark, where am I going to go? Where the Hell…nevermind."

He sighed and wanted to take her hand but they weren't like that. Hell, this was the longest conversation they'd ever had that didn't involve logistics. "Anywhere, Chloe, and I'll worry about the rest, alright?'

"Metropolis," she said, her tone defiant. "I want to have a picnic on the Planet's roof, daylight optional. See if you can manage that, alien."

"I wanted it to be daylight, but since I'm public enemy number one here, even I didn't think I could swing that much," he said as he stopped on the roof. They hadn't flown. It was hard enough to convince her that he'd set everything up only three days later at about one a.m., long after even the janitorial staff had left. Sullivan would let him run her when it was expedient and, frankly, she probably hadn't expected him to bother. That had to be why she'd named the city that Ultraman had once terrorized.

Well, she didn't know Clark Luthor as well as she thought. He wasn't going to back down from any challenge.

Still, he'd wanted to fly her there, to take time with it. Aw, Hell, who was he even kidding? Tess had always liked flying best. It was impressive, and it usually…well, he just wanted her to like him, and that was so pathetic that it was basically worthy of his other half over the damn rainbow.

Sullivan frowned back at everything: the Christmas lights he'd stolen and finagled into a light source, the small and, okay, rickety wooden tables and chairs he'd swiped too. Laid out were her favorite things, including sandwiches from a deli in Pittsburgh she'd nattered on about for months before he broke down and brought it to her the first time. He'd stopped short of anything suicidal like roses, candles, or wine, but there was a fifth of Jack there in case she were thirsty for more than water.

Not that he'd ever seen her drink. He liked the habit of it, but she never seemed to. For either of them, it could be water. Their systems didn't process alcohol like humans' did and they couldn't really get drunk. Well, he could, but there were no red meteor rocks around currently.

"You actually did it?" she asked, hesitating at the Planet's balustrade. "Why?"

"I said I was painfully bored," he said. "You and I get along better than J'onn and I do. He always acts like I'm some big fucking disappointment. I'm sorry. I didn't control who found me. Probably ended better off than if it had been Uncle Sam or some hick farmer."

"I…maybe we shouldn't do this."

"Tough," he said, sitting down. "I'm starving and I'm not going back to New York for at least an hour. You going to walk then, Frankenstein?"

"No."

"Great," he said, pulling out a sandwich and some fries for himself. Again, anything fancy would have set Sullivan's radar off worse. "Then sit down or don't, but I'm eating." It took about five minutes of him chomping down before she finally sat at her place and grabbed some food for herself. "See, not bad is it?"

She nodded and bit into the pastrami of hers. "You didn't have to do this."

"Are you slow too?" he repeated. "I was hungry, and I was going nuts. I'd have gone for a walkabout either way. Probably not to the former home of LuthorCorp and Queen Industries, but what are you gonna do?"

Sullivan didn't say anything after that, a rarity for her. Of course, she could talk endlessly about pattern analysis or questions about Krypton or his powers. God, don't even get her started on patrol planning. This was different. They were just two coworkers grabbing lunch, so to speak, and that didn't mean business. It meant social.

She'd clammed up tighter than Fort Knox.

Well, I did get her out here at least.

Clark sighed and took a sip of his soda. "Do you want to know what I miss about Metropolis?"

"What?"

"The skyline. It glitters at night in a way that even New York's doesn't. I was, uh, usually pretty busy with errands."

She nodded and he appreciated that, while she could have corrected the euphemism and dug in that he was nothing better than a common murderer, she didn't. "Yes?"

"And, still, I'd be flying between things or just take a breath and see it and it would always floor me. You ever see this city from a couple thousand feet in the air? There's nothing like it. So, your turn. What do you miss?"

"What makes you think I miss here? I lived in Smallville, remember? Town that changed my life," she said, making her palm glow just a bit to remind him of her power. As if he could forget.

"I can hack too. I know you lived here till you were thirteen and then your dad started working for mine out at the crap factory. So, I repeat, what do you miss?"

She set down her sandwich. "This is stupid, Luthor. What game are you even playing at?"

"I'm not. We're working ourselves to death. How can we save people's lives and fight off crazies like Brainiac, but not even take a chance to live ourselves. You forget what you're fighting for."

Sullivan glared at him and it was enough to make him, yes even him, shrink back from her. Clark wasn't sure that she'd realized her hands were glowing gold, gone almost nova. Whatever he'd done, he'd hit a massive nerve.

What the fuck I do now?

"I know what I fight for," she said, standing up and starting to the fire escape.

He blurred over and beat her there. "Are you kidding me? We're twenty stories up and then after that about a thousand miles from home. Where would you go? You know you can't…" he stopped then and felt his cheeks flare with embarrassment.

He hadn't been that obvious with his guilt since he was a kid.

Lionel had been sure to beat that instinct out of him, literally.

Luthors don't regret anything, son. Never forget that. We're gods among men; you most of all.

"Say it, alien," she said, and her hands were so bright that he could barely still look at her.

"What?"

"Finish your sentence."

"I…you'd draw attention to yourself and I don't even know if you have money. I mean, you must somehow but do you literally have cash on you for a bus ticket? If you got one, the ride would take a couple of days and people would, uh, stare."

"Yeah, they would, wouldn't they? I'm not a pretty sight and you know why that is."

"You know I do, and I'm-"

She swallowed and forced her palms to be normal again. "Don't say it. You're not! I don't know what that other Clark did to you or the Fortress or any of this magical mystery bullshit you've been on for the past year but you can't be sorry because you don't know what happened. You took everything from me-my life, my ability to fit in anywhere, my career."

"Huh?"

"I miss here!" she shouted, pointing at the globe. "I never thought you'd do this, that you'd bring me here. I figured even you were smart enough to know how likely you were to get caught. I was an intern here for two summers in high school. I was going to try and get an internship in college too, but that all went away."

"I…"

"So you know what I love best about Metropolis? I love here because if life were fair, I'd be the star reporter here and my cousin would be in the army and somewhere along the way she took my life and you helped with that. You took everything, alien. So don't look at me like that. Don't tell me you're sorry or pretend to care that people look at me funny if I go anywhere in daylight or anywhere period. Because you're not sorry. You forgot I ever existed. I was just another night to you, and you know that."

He didn't know what to say. It was the most he'd ever heard Chloe say at one time, the most emotional she'd ever been with him, and she hated him, couldn't stand the sight of him.

"Then why didn't you just kill me?"

"I could still be debating it," she said, coldly. "I think I could, you know, with a touch. Your planet ruined me but that must be fair because I could ruin you back."

"We're friends," he objected and now he was plaintive and if Lionel had ever heard him like this…Hell, even Tess would be laughing at his face over this weakness.

"You want us to be friends. There's a huge difference," she corrected. "Alien, be serious."

"Oh, I can be a lot of things, Frankenstein," he said, his heat vision flaring and her heart sped up. Good it fucking well should have. "We've worked together solid for over a year. I've saved your back and you've saved mine. What do you call that?"

"Necessary," she said. "Because I know what I fight for. Every time I pass a reflective surface you think I don't know? I fight so things like you, things like Zod or those weird Phantoms, any of them, never do to others what happened to me. That's plenty of motivation."

He swallowed then and it felt like his entire throat was lined with green K. "I can take you home now. You're right…I shouldn't have."

"No, you damn well shouldn't have. Bring me what? Out for a picnic like we'll be best buds after all you did? It's a war, Luthor, and our side's going to lose and lose big unless we're willing to use whatever we can."

"And I'm the 'whatever?'"

"Yes." Bitch didn't even hesitate when she answered.

"God, you hated my father but you sound a lot like him. I guess everyone uses me in the end."

"You can leave any time you want, but you won't because maybe that Clark did you a favor and you have some kind of a soul now. You know I'm telling the truth and the world's screwed without you helping it."

"True," he conceded.

"I just…what the Hell else would we be but coworkers, alien?"

"I…"

Her eyes went wide then, and he knew. In that instant he knew she got it, had ferreted out everything and, damn him, for falling for a (former) reporter. He should blame Sis. She'd ruined him. He'd bedded a lot of men and women in his life (Why limit yourself, son?), but he only liked ones with intelligence and a ruthless edge, like Tess.

He could only blame himself for how easily Sullivan had seen through him.

"This is a date, isn't it?"

"Chloe, no, Christ of course it's not," he floundered, wondering how he could be so pathetic and out of control around her.

"Oh my God, of course it is. It's why you didn't ask J'onn at all as part of the team. It's why you offered to fly me. It's why you got my favorite food in a side trip, and I'm the dumbest person on the planet. How long?"

"What?" he asked, and somehow his razor sharp Kryptonian mind was worth fuck all under her questioning.

Tears were starting to well up in those beautiful emerald depths. "How long have you felt like this, Clark?"

"I don't know," he replied honestly. "It's been a while. At first, I just was glad you hadn't killed me on sight. Then you were hot. I liked seeing you fight and that was it. I don't know when everything changed, but, fine. I'm not going to lie. It's not worth it and you'd know it's so much bullshit. I'm in love with you."

The blow wasn't fast but it was thorough. An arc of whatever weird power she ran off of lanced through him and he was thrown thirty feet into the table, sending what was left of their food flying. He couldn't move for a while, was too immobilized with the lingering pain to process much at all.

She was standing over him now, and he wondered if she realized that she was crying. "Why?"

"Huh? Also, ouch!"

"You'll be fine, you asshole. Why?"

He frowned and pulled himself to an upright position, even if he couldn't stand yet. "Why what?"

"Why do you love me?"

"Because you're amazing. You're smart and strong and don't take any crap from me or J'onn. I…you're beautiful."

She shook her head and, while her palms were bright again, she didn't reach to touch him. "Don't say that. You never get to say that."

"It's true. I see what you do and who you are and how brave, and I think you're the most amazing woman I've ever met."

Chloe gestured to her face. "I'm nothing. Don't you understand? You made me nothing, Clark. You can't take that back, and just because you feel guilty or sorry or I don't even know what, you can't fix it now. So stop pitying me. I am what I am and you are what you are. And you know what that is in both cases?"

"Lonely?"

"No, alien," she said, her tone finally composed as the light died a second time from her hands. "We're monsters now. That's all we are. We're monsters and we try to make amends but we're not…I'm going to catch that damn bus. I'd rather be gawked at for the millionth time than fly with you."

"You shouldn't. It'll…"

"Be hurtful? Make me feel badly? I'm twenty-seven and not sixteen, Clark. I'm quite used to being a freak, thank you," she said, rushing to the fire escape. "How could you do this to me? Humiliate me like this? God, you'd have done the Luthors proud tonight."

"Chloe, please, you have to believe me. You have to understand!" he shouted and he rushed after her.

She glared up at him from the steps. "Don't you dare or I really will see if you can die, Clark. Maybe you can't. Maybe you're as big a freak as I am. But in a thousand years from now?"

"Yes?"

"I will still hate you for tonight. I'll see you back on patrol in a week. I'm not spiting the city or the world because of you, but we're not friends and we'll never be lovers so go fuck yourself," she cursed, even as she continued her descent.

Stunned, Clark turned away from her and rocketed into the sky.

Fine.

If she wanted to be stubborn, then she could be stubborn. A few days' ride back to New York would serve her right. As he turned north to the Fortress, Clark took long deep breaths; they kept the rage away. There'd been no other night since he'd come home from the other Clark's world that he wanted to kill more than tonight. It was always the best cure for his rage, so soothing, but he'd promised. He'd promised Kent and Jor-El and himself that he'd be better than that.

He promised her too, even if she didn't know it.

Instead, he flew home to the only family of any kind he had left and tried not to let her words burn him, even if they were true.

He was a monster and he'd made her one right along with him.