Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
He was almost caught more times than he could count. At least, he thought that he might have been. He wasn't sure. He might have become paranoid. He wasn't sure of that either. He had been beyond exhausted for longer than he cared to remember. He knew he had no recollections left of what it had been like to have a mind that wasn't always driving itself further into the ground with calculations and reevaluations and analysis of what had gone wrong in his previous attempts and how a course correction might be brought about. There was no room for anything else yet he had to make room. His world had not stopped turning. Villains were still villainous. Disasters were still disastrous. He had solutions to find and things to design. There were expectations he must meet and there was attention he must not draw. There was no reprieve. There was no rest. If there was not an immediate crisis looming ahead of them, then the specter of complete annihilation via the attempted realignment of too dissimilar universes had to be addressed. He had to do the addressing.
He did lose his way upon occasion. He had his moments of doubt as to whether there had been so much damage that there was nothing to be done. He could only hold fast to the one thing he knew untouched by all other thoughts - Chloe Sullivan was the only way. It was no longer possible to hope for an isolation approach to mitigate the situation. There were too many tendrils tying her to Clark for satisfactory assurance that that could any longer be enough.
The notes he had taken with color coded time line differentials were extensive. It was a lucky thing that he no longer had friends who might visit and ask questions about the binder after binder of information that populated his bookshelves. He no longer had any satisfactory explanations to offer - not even to himself. He wasn't entirely sure why he did the particular things that he did any longer, so he had no way of attempting to explain to someone else. He only knew the large picture. He was flying moment by moment in regards to the details.
Little changes were the order of the day - anything from a change in ink pens to ensure that Chloe's number would not be washed away from a soon to be killer's hand to seemingly unimportant things left here or there to ensure that the proper person would become interested or suspicious as the situation warranted and target her at the right time. He even ensured further entanglement with the Luthor family including being in the middle of two of them. Nothing worked. Nothing.
He regretted now the moment of weakness that had seen him failing to jam the door that allowed her to escape from a soon to be detonated safe house, but the moment had passed and could not be returned to - he could only ensure that he suffered from no similar lapses of dedication ever again. It wasn't Chloe's fault, and she didn't deserve to die in some excruciating manner, but there was nowhere left for deserve. She had to go. If he could make it painless, then that would, of course, still be his preference, but he could no longer afford to be choosy about the methods when they presented themselves.
He thought he had finally won when he arrived at the point wherein Brainiac arrived on the scene. He had all the information he could ever want about how to handle that particular remnant of Kryptonian tech literally at his fingertips. It took minimal modifications to have it sending out a beacon that brought Doomsday to Chloe. The creature was known as Doomsday for a reason. The damage that should have followed in his wake should be self-evident. Chloe should have had no means to escape that sort of catastrophe. He fixated on her. How did that not get her killed? It still boggled his mind. All the tweaking he did, all the distance he threw between people, and she still ended up rescued and protected. It was insanity - that's what it was.
It was then that he had his great epiphany - he didn't have to work alone. The Legion had a multitude of members of various backgrounds and skill sets. There were members who were young and impressionable. There were those who considered themselves students of history who would be eager to take on a mission from a well-respected scientist who had reason to believe the timeline was fluctuating. What would they know of the difference between time and reality jumping? They would be zealous; they would keep quiet. They would follow orders, and if he stressed to them that Brainiac's host must be eliminated, then they would see no reason to question that. He literally felt the weight of the world come off of his shoulders when he enlisted their help. He had an excellent feeling about their ability to succeed where he had so often failed.
It was a brilliant plan; it was nearly foolproof - until it wasn't.
The three of them came back so proud of themselves for having solved the problem without unnecessary bloodshed. They were ahing and ohing over young Clark's compassion and how his faith in his friend had been proven right. It was nearly as infuriating as it was messy to clean up after. The weight of the fate of the world resettling into place on his shoulders only added to his disquiet.
He had had to modify their memories, and trying to get one up on a telepath in order to modify her memory was a feat the logistics of which would have made the statistics of success algorithm in the station's computer system freeze up in indecision. He was a little terrified when he watched the aftermath of his final round of intercession in the Doomsday situation. He wasn't sure which bit of interference was at fault (there was only so much that was a matter of public record about the AI of the fortress after all and he had given up rather quickly on that route once he realized that he wasn't sure how his attempt at additions to the programming were actually manifesting). It might have been one thing; it might have been the culminations of the lot. There were hundreds of pushes and pulls and changes he had wrought; the lines of causation were bound to be muddled. All he could tell was that in some manner his attempts at erasure of Chloe had led to some strange (and deeply unpleasant) glitch that appeared to be manifesting itself as an eroding of Clark.
He didn't understand it, but that, after all, was why meddling in timelines was such a forbidden area in the first place. A Clark Kent who dangled young women by their throats and exercised so little self-control that he knocked his longtime allies and supposed friends around without seeming to realize what he had done was not anyone that he recognized as any sort of a Clark Kent outside of the so called anomaly universe where he trod a villain path. It was disconcerting to watch. He knew good and well that he had a serious issue with grey areas in his own handling of his particular problem situation, but he wasn't the man who would be Superman. He, even in the moments when he realized that he was bordering on the delusional in his drive to correct his mistake, expected better from the young one. He had the strangest temptation to call up Martha Kent and ask her if she knew what her child was doing. He shook that off of course and continued with his calculations.
He tried another little Legion intervention, and that, in the end, was finally the move that got him caught. There would be no more attempts to fix the original misstep. He could no longer even attempt to mitigate some of the damage he had done.
He thinks he had a bit of a breakdown. He doesn't remember much from those days. He has read the transcripts - they aren't pretty. They sound like the ramblings of a madman, but he can still remember what it felt like to believe so strongly that one person was a small, insignificant price to pay in order to prevent boomerang theory from being proven true. He knows he was obsessed. He can see all the symptoms clearly in the case study for training purposes that they have made of those years of his life.
He just has to live with that knowledge - just like he has to live with the knowledge of all of the things that he has done. The only thing he does not have to know is how it all turned out in the end - any information on CAS-1 has been forbidden him as part of the therapy component of his sentence. In that case, he has to live with the not knowing.