Just a short scene in which Mustafa kicks Clark in the knee. So to speak.

Clark woke languidly, and decided to wander the halls that night again, though he stayed away from the Lab 6-to-10 wing. No point in waking up anyone. (Well, maybe Jacques. He owed the man serious payback for that drubbing at poker and the revenge Jacques had exacted. Yeah, he had known the odds against the penny coming up heads like that were insane, but twenty two royal flushes in a row? If they'd been playing for more than pocket change, Clark would have had to go rob a bank. As it was, the crazy man had upped the ante with each bet until he demanded, literally, the shirt off his back. And pants. Right there in front of everyone, all laughing themselves sick. Clark's ears still heated up at the thought of the publicly forced near-striptease. If he could have been certain that Jacques was asleep and would have been one of the ones summoned for guard duty, he would have risked super-speeding in and ripping the Lab 8 vault door off just to get even.)

"Don't you DARE." The voice behind him caught him off guard, and when he spun around in automatic guilt, there was no one there. At his eye level, anyway. Looking lower down, he recognized Mustafa, the engineer who had prevented him from running off and doing something really stupid by simply standing in his way, armed with nothing but sheer human courage. Clark gulped at being caught. "Don't ... what? I wasn't doing anything."

"You were THINKING of doing something stupid again." Mustafa planted his hands on his hips and dared Clark to deny it. Coming from someone that Lana could have beaten at arm-wrestling, the challenge should have seemed ridiculous, but it wasn't.

Clark smiled weakly, a little sadly. "What, are you a telepath?"

"If John has any telepaths here, they're smart enough not to let him know it. Kal-El, you wear your emotions like a neon sign. Even these lousy phones John has stuck me with could tell anyone on the other end what you're thinking. People give you a hard time, for fun or not, and you give yourself grief to make up for it. That's on the not-mentally-healthy side, you know? I'm not calling you crazy, but I am saying it's something you ought to think on."

"I've thought on it." Clark's voice went distant. "I cause grief to other people. There doesn't seem to be anything I can do to make up for it. When I try, I usually make it worse."

"You're feeling sorry for yourself," Mustafa said sharply. "You're stronger than just about anyone else on the planet, you have senses and capabilities most people could only dream of, you're tall and good looking by the standards of nearly every society that ever was, and you're feeling sorry for yourself. You don't have the smallest idea what it's like to be discriminated against. Buy a clue, kid. Some of us would kill to trade places with you."

Clark turned burning eyes on him. "You can have it."

"Really? Try being from a culture where manliness is measured by strength. And height. And the willingness to commit suicide. Your stupid stunt in Lab 8 notwithstanding, boy. Since you're not an agent, and still have to be protected from yourself, that's not quite the same as standing in front of a tank. Or in Lake and Nicole's case, a Chernobyl. John took me in because I was the only survivor of a bomb that killed the rest of my family."

Clark staggered backwards. He'd known about Lake, well, sort of, but this was a level of brutality that Smallville had not prepared him for. "Your ... I'm ... sorry."

"Yeah, well," Mustafa waved one hand, "Being short has its advantages. Something you'll never know about. Though of course you do know about losing the whole family thing. Waking up with blood and pieces of flesh all over you, though, you can probably do without for awhile. Just don't get too freaked when it does happen someday. You can live with it. I did. Of course," he reflected, "I'd already seen a lot of other crap by the time I was twelve."

Clark had seen a lot of other odd things by the time he was twelve too, but he didn't think learning that he was a dozen times stronger than anyone else counted in the same class as watching your friends and family blown to shreds and waking up with.... He felt hollow and sick in a way even Lab 8 couldn't do to him. "I'm ... I'm sorry," he whispered painfully.

"Not hardly your fault, now is it, kid? You hadn't even gotten to Earth yet. And even if you had, even if you could have done all the things you can now, what would you have done? Try to stand guard over every family in every country on the planet? You think somebody isn't being blown to bits every minute of every day? Go watch comm central."

"I -- I did. When, when you told me to go to Wynter about Lex. There was so much...." Clark closed his eyes briefly. "I'm only beginning to get an idea of how much there is to do. And how impossible it is to do it all. But I have to try, Mustafa. I have to do something to make up for how much pain I've caused, even when I didn't mean to."

Mustafa snorted. "Oh, Allah, a martyr complex. Don't ever let Lake know about that. You really don't want to know what kind of consolation you'd get from someone who's killed more people than you've probably even met. Before she was your age. On purpose."

Clark swallowed. This safe, sheltered environment held unexpected trap doors.

"Oh yeah. The reason I came looking for you. You got a telegram. Normally I don't personally deliver telegrams, but this one's from Lake and Nicole." The communications engineer handed him a piece of paper and went purposefully on down the hall.

Clark looked after him, feeling as if he'd been hit. Several times. Maybe Kal-El was invulnerable to emotions, but Clark wasn't. He flipped open the single sheet of paper.

HEY KID. DESERT SUCKS. BUGS SUCK. PEOPLE OK. FOOD SUCKS. WORK SUCKS. WISH YOU WERE HERE. NIKKI & LAY.

Nobody but Nicole called the deadly psycho-telekinetic "Lay."

Clark wondered if he ought to be amused.