A/N: I know... I know... It took me almost a month. Again...:O I'm in the middle of my University's exam period so consider this update as a miracle:P I had to write a whole new dialog while I was steadying so don't be to harsh with me... Okay, now (as always) I want to thank my two amazing editors, my miracle makers:O SHADOLibrarian and Misha (aka RoswellianMisha) And here it is, Chapter 6 Part 2. Enjoy!:D

Fortress of Solitude, Saturday, 20:38pm

Lying curled up on the Fortress floor he didn't know how much time had passed. He didn't even care actually, until he thought about the possibility to be found like this by Richard or even worse Lois. His chest was freezing, yet his back had the exactly opposite feeling: It was burning and stinging. He could now feel his pulse beating in his ravaged veins exposed to the cool air. He felt like they had ripped the flesh from his back and he knew that it wasn't only a thought. It was the truth.

He had never imagined that there was such kind of pain. A pain in this world that would literally make him kneel. After New Krypton he had had a taste of the meaning of pain. But now he was feeling in his own skin another dimension of that term. The human body dimension.With every hit he had been recalling apart of the reason that had caused the punishment. Liar, a voice was now screaming in his head, no one had forced him to accept. He was recalling her lips as he was biting his own from the pain. Her smooth skin as his own was dissolved. Her tender voice from the nights before he left, instead of the sharp cracking sound of the whip that was raping the air. God he loved her, yet as it seemed, she had moved on AGAIN.

He stood on his knees with his back killing him as the dry blood had broken and fresh one started to flow again. His eyes He blinked several times in rapid succession because of the remaining tears. At least with the pain in his back, he had forgotten his arm, but not the pain that was tearing his soul.

"Kal-El?" he heard his father's voice calling him.

"What else do you want?" he asked through his clenched teeth. He was sure that the giant AI head would hear the anger on his voice and eventually he would leave him alone. 'All alone, again,' he sarcastically thought. He was wrong. As he turned to where the head was supposed to be, he saw a man walking straight to him.

"Why did you accept it?" the man asked with the voice of his father's AI. Now the man was in front of him. He was a form that Kal-El had never seen out of the crystal wall. He was... him.

"You told me to do so," he replied, breathing heavily. LIAR, the voice screamed again inside his head.

"No, I never forced you, I asked you. All this time you never let me tell you how to avoid this irrational punishment. You almost begged for it. Why?'" Jor-El asked, pain evident in his voice.

'I could have avoided it? That was... a surprise.' He didn't regret having accepted the whipping. Was he mad or something? 'No I'm just... No!' It was too painful to admit it again…

"What do you care anyway?" he snapped at him as every muscle on him protested to his sudden movement when he got up to face Jor-El. You only wanted to follow your rules, your laws and I DID IT."

"I wanted you to follow rules and laws for the benefit of those that are weaker than you. Weaker to act and think right."

"Here we go again" he murmured trying to find which crystal would turn down the AI. At the same time his bleeding wounds didn't help him much.

"I am your father. I loved you as a father and even if I lost everything that makes it right to use that word, my love for you… It will overcome my already forfeit rights once again and let me selfishly claim you as my son. Even if it is only for my own ears."

Clark's hands stopped searching on the control panel. He looked his father's glittering eyes and realized what he had said. All that, it was just a voice, a guide, an echo from the past. Now he turned to be something more than just a link with to his origins. He claimed a place next to his foster father, and it was then when he understood that he had every right to do it. Jor-El tried to be a father to him like he was trying to be a father for Jason.

"So, why did you do it? Do you feel regrets about your involvement with her?" he asked him again.

"Never! That, never... I wanted to stop, for once I wanted to stop," he knew that he wasn't making any sense, although his father's eyes seemed to understand him.

"I wanted to feel something else than the emotional pain I thought that it would make the other go away… that it would make me..."

" closer to them," Jor-El finished for him. "When will you understand that is not your gifts what make you different? Even if you are like humans without your powers, it is not that what makes you an outcast. You are different, but you don't have to be an outcast."

"I've already explained to you why I hesitate for you to be involved with a human," Jor-El added with a hint of averseness.

"Yes, your explanation was crystal clear," Clark sarcastically said. "As a mater of fact, hasn't my involvement cost me enough to spare me another lecture?"

"If you think, my son, that I or the council had anything to do with the deep cuts on your back, or the harsh nature of your punishment, then you are terribly wrong."

Clark was taken aback of what he had just heard. A sense of paranoia started to fill dangerously the air.

"This fortress is what is left from our civilization, Kal-El. It doesn't have the power to force you to do anything you don't really want. It was build so to guide you, not to control you. The truth is that you have the control of what is going to be done and how." He took a few more steps closer to him to reveal so much more than Clark wanted at the moment. Characteristics that had never occurred to him to notice for more than two seconds in the mirror in his life, were now placed in someone else's face except from his son's.

"When you accepted your punishment you practically gave the system the order to start. The strikes should have caused only a few bruises yet you demolished your back." He didn't see him take a few steps closer or run his hand on his swollen and still bleeding back. Yet surprisingly, Jor-El's hand didn't cause him pain when he finally noticed the old man standing beside him, just a brief alleviating breeze.

A sigh of relief escaped easily from his dry lips. For a second he forgot the pain, the confusion and the anxiety that had taken over his body and mind the last 48 hours. In that second he closed his eyes and when he opened them again he focused on the black cores of his father's cerulean eyes.

"How is it possible that I am responsible for my injuries? It doesn't make sense," the words came out cold, careless. The truth was that he was so emotionally drowned that there was no strength left to color his voice anymore. 'Nothing seems to make sense anymore,' he thought.

"Lets leave that question be the last, shall we?" a faint smile appeared in Jor-El's face to let him know that there were other matters to be discussed long before that.

"First, can you tell me why have you been punished?"

"You implied that I had committed adultery," Clark answered with a sarcastic smile.

"To whom? Only to your dead mate? It's more complicated than you think." Now it was Jor-El's turn to show frustration. Frustration that Clark couldn't place.

"When you accepted your punishment you didn't only recognize the link between you and your Kryptonian life companion. You also admitted that your relationship with the human was a mistake. That it wasn't a relationship based on true feelings, or one that had potential to be a lifetime commitment." This time his father's voice came out twisted in bitter disbelief that Clark didn't catch immediately.

"That's not true!" he shouted, "You... you..." his breathing stopped unexpectedly. He felt his heart pounding painfully in his chest while a weird sense of dizziness came over him.

"You've got to be kidding me!" He managed to whisper before kneeling again, trying unsuccessfully to take more air with a few brief inhales into his lungs. Surprisingly the Jor-El's AI didn't seem to worry about it.

"It's just a panic attack. You need to calm down a bit. You pushed yourself too hard today." The worry that was nowhere to be seen on his face was now sounding clearly in his voice. "It's too much to take. It would be better to leave the rest for another time."

"No! It has to end now." He couldn't postpone it anymore. He needed answers. Answers, untold facts and maybe,just maybe, at one of the corners of his life, there would be a hint of hope. "Please," he was pleading. That was definitely not a good sign.

"The truth, Kal-El, is that you were the one that never thought that you could have the ability to have a lifetime commitment until now. You were the one that lead the whip because of your guilt. Because of the grief of what you lost. You embraced fully your Kryptonian nature yet you forgot that you were brought up as a human." He was speaking to him softly. Like a father to his few years old child. Things that should be simpler than breathing were turning to be more difficult than life itself. But that's what this was about. His life.

"You always told me that even if I was brought up as a human being I would never be one of them-" Every second brought him closer to madness.

"That's true. But you never found the balance you needed in your life. Your genealogy, your heritage is Kryptonian but your spirit is completely human-like. You loved someone and the only thing you had to do to avoid all this mess was to give her the place of your dead Kryptonian mate with just one statement. Was it so hard?" he asked.

"It wasn't hard. It was terrifying and the only thing that I desperately wanted for years." He chuckled at the thought of his son's strong headed mother before turning back to his serious mood once again. Ordered

"I don't' have all the answers you want son. I have to let you seek for the answers you want alone. Just remember that problems are always made of their own answers. It's oxymoron yet it's true." Jor-El was leaving him again to let him struggle for answers.

"What about the whipping? You haven't told me how I caused it. Ordered it to start, yes, but what happened? How could it begin to whip me to eventually rip half of my back. I want this answer" He had to have an answer to this.

"Because you thought that it was what you deserved for your adultery against your human mate. I tried to stop it before you killed yourself. Although I couldn't stop it, I managed to make the strikes gentler before I successfully stopped them two strikes before its end. You were the one that demanded the last two so the program obeyed." His body had a weird numb sensation all over. It was a nightmare. Now he wanted to find the blissful dream that was hidden somewhere in this story.

"I was a fool, wasn't I? A fool among fools. I played it so well for so long that it got under my skin without notice." The numb sensation never left his body, as now was blanking his mind.

"You live among a race with potentials. A race that not only have you saved a thousand times over, but that you also love unconditionally. You allowed yourself to be loved and because of that you created a unique piece of greatness for this world."

"Jason... "

"If it's not unique to see two worlds, two persons, two individuals connected through the existence of a child, then I do not see what unique is really meant to mean."

Those were his final words. The AI form turned to fog, leaving him with more questions than before.

"Is he awake?" he firmly asked Lois as he stood still in the room's door.

"Only for a few minutes, then he fell asleep again." Lois answered, staring at him with a worried look. 'But she couldn't have known anything,' Clark thought. The reason was probably that he looked like hell.

"I dressed him with the clothes you gave us. You know, my colleague, Clark, gave him the same clothes but made with a different fabric? They look more than pajamas, than…"

"I know, I gave them to him" he cut her off, not wanting to reveal too much, in front of Richard.

"You know Clark?" Lois asked him, surprised.

"It's not the time, or the place to discuss this but yes, more than you think" he said using a final tone to end what he couldn't finish at the moment. There were going to enter to a dangerous territory, he was sure, and he also knew that he was not going to survive if Lois' smolder temper came back to the surface. Not now, not ever...

"He knows about... Jason? Have you told him that..." 'she can't even say it', Clark thought. 'She can't even say that he is your son.'

"I never needed to tell him anything," he said, letting her know that he didn't want to keep talking about Clark any further. Even better, not to talk about anything at all.

He saw Jason sleeping and then he noticed that there was something different about his hair. Lois had made him a small curl. Now he really looked exactly like Jor-El. Only the age and the white hair were missing. When he had wanted to see how the boy was doing and to inform them about their departure, he had never intended to come so close to Lois or his son. Now he was standing above the boy's head and his right hand's fingers played with his son's curl. He smiled and saw Lois and Richard do the same. He was ready to kiss him on his forehead but his back stung him so the smile turned to a grimace of pain. He stopped and touched again his son's forehead before he lost the courage that the smiles had given him. That loss of courage made him step back from his son's resting bed.

He didn't want the others to realize that something was wrong with his back. He played one more time with the curl and lifted his hand from the child's forehead. Then, it happened. A drop of blood that had dripped from his back had just fallen on his son's forehead. Terrified, he looked at his hand and saw other small rivers drifting down from the same source. Shocked, he looked up to Lois. She had frozen. She slowly turned her wide eyes from the blood spot on Jason to his eyes and right back again to the child.

"My arm is still bleeding. Sorry," technically, he hadn't lied to her. His left arm was still bleeding a little. 'Yes, but only a little,' a familiar voice whispered in the back of his head once again. 'Oh, shut up,' he replied to himself.

"That wasn't your hand," she said, stressing every word to him, lifting his right sleeve, to prove her statement.

"I… I…" he mumbled and turned his back to her face, trying to escape from her indignant look that her sparkling fire eyes were given him now.

He was ready to walk out of the room, when she touched him on his back, trying to stop him. The pain froze him instantly, his breath stopped, and he turned to look at her again. He saw her looking at him, her hand in shock. Her hand was slightly covered with his own blood. The damned blood had wet his black clothes. He didn't look in her eyes again – he wasn't going to give her an answer. He just opened the nearest closet and picked aclean outfit.

Slowly, he turned to Richard and their eyes met. He had to be honest with them. At least with the one thing he should be...

"I can't take us back. My powers will be back in a few hours, yet I will need days to restore my strength before I can fly," he unwilling confessed. "Richard, Luthor brought us here with helicopters, I believe that his bullies haven't took them all, could you see if you can handle flying one of those?"

"I believe that we will not have any problem with that," he assured him, trying not to look at Lois' hand and the blood that was making her lose control of her breathing with every passing second.

"We will check it then. Hopefully, we will be ready to leave in one hour," Clark said briefly and reached for the door quickly, with moves that cut his breath with every step he took.

He heard behind him Richard saying "Okay," as he was going straight to the bathroom. In the next fifteen minutes, the water in the bath had colored red. Clark had found finally some relief to his open wounds. Today, he had entered Hell and he hadgotten out of it almost in one piece.