SUMMARY: Chapter Eleven Alone and upset, Clark tries to deal with alienating – literally – his best friend.

WARNINGS: Rated Teen for language and sexuality. Veers into the realm of AU after the episode "Red" from Season 2. Because I just – LOVE red kryptonite!

DISCLAIMER: So many people own Superman and Smallville that I don't even know where to begin. We'll just sweepingly say Siegel and Shuster, DC Comics, and the show's creators. It's this twisted copyright situation, anyway. But I'm not making any money of them, rest assured. Just – playing with them. In my mind. It's not my fault they picked Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, eh!

AUTHOR NOTE: My version of red kryptonite varies from the show's use. In comic canon, red kryptonite causes a different reaction each time Superman/Clark is exposed to it, and the results typically last 24 to 48 hours.

Slant

Chapter Eleven

He didn't know what room in the castle that he'd run to; in all his visits, Clark had never fully explored its many winding twists and turns. But it didn't matter now. What mattered was that he'd gotten away from Lex. Here he sat, in this dark room with its furniture covered in white sheets like grotesque spirits, him half-curled into this smaller, strange body that he now occupied, and told himself not to cry.

A thing, Lex had called him. A thing.

Clark hadn't known how he was going to say his secret; for all of his determination, the words had still barely come forward. He'd come with the rocks; he'd brought the meteors. In those few sentences, he had felt all of the guilt and the shame pour our, the knowledge that someone whose life had been inalterably changed by the meteors would finally know the truth.

Lex hadn't responded at first, and Clark had felt this twisting, sickening sort of pain in his stomach. It had scared him. He had wondered if maybe this was what humans felt, when they thought something bad was going to happen. Like their insides were screaming.

Then, slowly, words had started to form. Lex had refused to look at him, had instead stared down as he spoke. Clark, deprived of his normally far above average hearing, struggled to understand at first. But the words had become clearer and clearer, and the feeling in the pit of stomach deepened as he made out words. Alien from another planet. Maybe you're here to kill us, you caused the meteors, my whole fucking life was destroyed and you caused the goddamn meteors to fall, you're going to conquer the fucking world.

Clark didn't realize that he'd run away until he found himself clinging to doorframe of the strange room he was now in. Taunting, the words had somehow managed to follow him. You thing, he'd said. His best friend thought he was a thing. Lex hated him; he blamed him, for everything.

Pete had been angry, had even condemned Clark for those few, short moments. But it had been because Clark had hidden his origins, not because he had come with the meteors. Then again, Pete's life had not been affected by the meteors, certainly not like Lex's had. Pete hadn't been through the hell Clark knew Lex had experienced. He lightly touched his scalp, feeling how smooth, how utterly devoid of hair it was.

He pulled his hand away as if burned. It was his fault, no matter what his parents had ever said. His and whoever sent him to this world in a fiery streak of destruction. He tried not to imagine what kind of a world he'd come from, a world where people shot fire from their eyes or could crush bones between their fingers. A world of monsters, maybe.

His right hand. He examined it again, free of Lex's intense scrutiny.

Clark was not the only one with secrets. Ever since he'd cut his hand on that shattered bottle on Lex's desk, he could feel it healing. At first, he'd thought it was another human thing, to feel the sensation of skin knitting itself together. Strange, but normal.

Not so. His (Lex's) hand was almost completely healed. Clark had rarely been hurt, but he'd seen his friends and their various cuts and bruises from the rigours of daily human life, and no cut that deep should be nearly healed after half a day. Clark could only guess about what had happened to Lex's body during the meteor shower, but losing his hair obviously wasn't the only change.

He wondered if Lex knew that he was different. He must have. He must have seen others who had been injured, and known that he was healing faster than the rest of them. He remembered Lex once mentioning that he'd had asthma as a kid, but it stopped. After the meteor shower? Almost certainly. He'd changed. And then he'd stopped changing.

It flooded back suddenly, all the things that Lex had been through during Clark's year of knowing him. All of the injuries he'd suffered, and yet they all seemed to leave him flawless as always. Him, who studied each and every person who was different in Smallville, and wondered what made them different. Him, and all the time he'd been quietly healing, staying healthy, unchanging.

"Hypocrite!" Clark spat out. Lex had wanted so much to learn other people's secrets, while carefully concealing his own. I don't get sick, he'd said. But he was a meteor freak just like the rest of them. Another story to put up on Chloe's Wall of Weird.

A vicious twist of scorn penetrated Clark's thoughts. At least he wasn't a freak the way Lex was. He was an alien; he was probably normal for wherever he'd come from. But all those meteor mutants, they were just that – mutants. Humans who weren't really human anymore. For all of Clarks' abilities and the lies he had to tell, at least he was born that way.

Almost immediately, he felt shame wash through him. Lex and Lana and the countless others who'd been changed, it wasn't their fault. It was his. His and his alien parents, or whoever had sent him away to this world. He couldn't blame Lex for his anger, for his hate. Clark tried to imagine himself in Lex's condition, and he knew that he couldn't possibly have simply accepted with open arms the very – the very thing that had caused him so much pain. The thing that had made him different.

A freak.

If he'd thought the situation was bad enough before, what now? If he hadn't already begun, soon enough Lex would start to learn of each and every one of Clark's abilities. And what would he feel to know that he could see through walls or burn things with his eyes? Would his obvious disgust grow more and more each time he learned of yet another thing the body he was trapped in could do?

And what else? Already, Clark felt that Lex's body had its own way of doing things. He had to struggle to move the way he was used to moving, to talk the way he was used to talking. He was swearing more than he had ever sworn in his entire life and unconsciously moving the way Lex moved. What if the remnants of Lex's mind were the next thing to try and take control? It seemed impossible, but God, the situation was already laughing in the face of impossibility. What if he were to learn what was inside of Lex's head? What would he see there?

But the more horrifying thought was what Lex might see in Clark's mind. The secrets that had nothing to do with Clark's alien heritage or discovering new powers at incredibly bad times. The things that had to do with how he sometimes resented his parents, or hated his friends, or wanted to just escape himself because he was big and awkward and not quick-witted or brilliant. And the layer below even that one was even worse; the layer below that one saw Clark beginning to question the things about life he had always taken for granted: live in a home without worrying about losing it because of money problems, having friends that he could trust, living a long, full life, being in absolute love and adoration with Lana and marrying her and having children some day.

Those haunting questions that even now, in the midst of everything else that was going on, constantly swirled around inside his mind. They were there, asking those meddlesome things that Clark was mostly too afraid to even consider. What if the Kents lost their home? What if his friends learned about him and betrayed him? What if he ended up strapped to a lab table dead and cut open with tools made of glowing green meteor rocks?

What if he didn't want to marry Lana and have children with her someday? What if he didn't adore her? What if he didn't love her?

There were mirrors in the room. Were there mirrors in every room of this big, haunted house? Clark approached one slowly and tried not to rear away from the opposite image of Lex walking slowly toward him, eyes wide and mouth tense, still looking faintly dazed from shock.

Slowly, purposefully, he raised his hand and softly touched his fingers to his cheek. Deliberately and unhurried, his fingers danced over the contours of his (new?) face, tracing the soft eyebrows, around the shape of each eye, the sharp profile of the nose, the bowed lips with their tiny scar. Then his hand slipped lower, to his neck from where a steady pulse beat, then over the smooth silk of his shirt, all the way to his abdomen. He shivered, and withdrew his hand.

Clark could pretend to be ignorant of his deeper thoughts all he wanted, but the truth (if that word could ever be applied in a meaningful way again) was that he was fascinated with Lex. At least, that was the word he allowed himself to use when the slim, pale businessman invaded his thoughts, day and night, even his dreams.

Clark didn't remember many of his dreams, but there were times when he'd awoken as most normal teenage boys did, knowing that they would do their own laundry that week, and he told himself not to think about the fact that he knew, just knew, that Lex had been in his dreams. Because it didn't mean anything, or more appropriately, it couldn't mean anything. Clark couldn't put his parents through anything else, anything that could possibly be like… like that.

They were open-minded people. How could they not be, with him as a son? But he knew how his mom and dad dreamed of one day having grandchildren of their own to coo and cuddle and spoil, and if Clark were – if he were not – damn, he couldn't even think it to himself. God, how disappointed they'd be. Of course, Clark didn't even know if he could have children with regular humans. Hell, it was probably the least of his worries.

He couldn't think about this now. He couldn't think about having children, because that meant thinking about how one made children, and that meant sex, and here he was in his best friend's body thinking that really, he'll never know, not if I don't do anything, just look at him, and it was all really too ridiculous because his best friend thought he was a thing and he hated him and he wasn't attracted to Lex and how could he be even thinking about sex with his best friend when he was in his best friend's body?

And if Lex found out? Well, Clark wasn't sure if it would be possible for Lex to hate him more than he obviously already did, and he wasn't keen on finding out just how much hate a single person could hold. So, he would hope that body-switching was as far as it went, and they wouldn't start reading one another's thoughts. Then again, that could be his next ability, and wouldn't it just happen that said ability would show up at the worst possible time? Of course, Clark had yet to tell all of his secrets, and that included his abilities.

Clark had been stupid to ask for no more secrets between the two of them, anyway. What was more childish than asking such a thing?

Probably running away from someone in the middle of the conversation when they're freaking out about your literal inhumanity, he thought to himself miserably. Yes, he would definitely categorize himself in the class of total idiot. But what could he do? Try and go back to the place where he was before – in both the literal and figurative sense? He could hardly expect Lex to ever trust him again, but of course, he would have to find Lex again first before he could even consider that. And without his abilities in this monster of a house, it would take him an incredibly long time to find his way back to Lex. That is, if Lex hadn't run off to Lexcorp or Luthercorp or Cadmus or any number of scientifically-minded businesses who might be able to get him back into his own body.

Which would put both of them in danger. The scientists who worked at any of those places were people (like Lex?) who wouldn't just agree to relinquish their hold on the first extraterrestrial life form discovered on planet Earth, not for all the money or power that Lex could and would offer them. And if Lionel Luthor himself got a hold of Lex and Clark in this situation, there was no telling what would happen to them.

Despite Lex's reaction, Clark couldn't let them both end up strapped to lab tables because he'd been afraid to tell Lex his secret until it was too late. He had to find Lex before it was too late. Of course, there was still the problem of navigating the house without x-ray vision. And the fact that Lex would probably avoid him at all costs. And the previous sudden, unexpected rush of arousal from his earlier thoughts that he was struggling to quell because of all the things that had happened over the past few hours, that one was really crossing the line.

Lines. He couldn't define lines anymore.

"I said I'd never hate you."

Solid ice in Clark's stomach. He nearly gasped aloud, then turned to look at the room's entryway to see – himself – standing in it. His mouth opened, but at first, no words came out. He could only look at the body he no longer inhabited and try to tell himself that this was Lex somewhere inside of there, with that unreadable expression on his (Clark's?) face. The situation still seemed so unreal, like looking at a mirror that was slanted and trying to understand the reflection.

"You… how did you get…?"

A smirk. Now that was very much Lex, and at least for the present moment, Clark could accept that he was Lex and Lex was him, because he never smiled quite like that.

"Apparently, you can see through walls."

"Lex –"

"Clark." His face changing into an expression of the utmost seriousness, Lex approached Clark. Clark struggled not to step back, and barely won. The apprehension must have been clear on his face, however, because Lex's expression was instantly pained, regretful.

Regretful? Clark was trying not to jump to conclusions, but the fact that Lex had gone looking for him was at least something to be optimistic about when everything else seemed to be turning out so badly. Things like his best friend calling him a thing, and switching bodies with said disgusted friend, and contemplating what his parents would do to him if he came back home like this, not to mention his attraction to Lex, which could be considered both narcissistic and masturbatory-inclined at this point in time…

Clark, really, shut the fuck up. Nevermind the fact that he was (thankfully) not speaking aloud, his mind traveling along that train of thought really, really had to stop. He told himself to be calm and collected, and careful – careful as he could be now, anyway.

"What do you want, Lex?" He asked, and prided himself on how steely his voice sounded, how contained his anger and hurt were. It didn't hurt that he had Lex's voice, he supposed.

"To apologize for that – that outburst. It was unwarranted, and I shouldn't have – I was just –"

Lex was having difficulty speaking. Clark would probably blame that on his body being clumsy and awkward and not at all like Lex and what he was used to, but his anger was fading even as Lex struggled to get out the right words.

"I just – I panicked. It wasn't what I expected at all, and I let my emotions get the best of me, and I didn't stop for one second to think about how it would make you feel and… I made a mistake, Clark, and I hope that you can forgive me for it."

The way it sounded was just so… Lex. Talking about emotions getting the better of him, and not being empathic to the alien in his house. Basically, admitting to being human instead of a Luthor, for once. Now Clark remembered why he and Lex were best friends.

"I'm the one who made the mistake, Lex." Lex's eyes widened, and Clark suddenly realized that as real and sincere as Lex's words had sounded (and hopefully/probably were), it had been a rehearsed speech, and one he hadn't been expecting Clark to respond to, at least not the way he had. Just so Lex! "I made the mistake of being afraid, instead of telling you the truth. I made the mistake of lying to you."

"I'm sure you had your reasons, Clark. Like your parents, for instance. Undoubtedly they won't be happy to know that I'm aware of your – heritage." Clark couldn't help it. He laughed.

"That will probably be the least of their worries. Considering everything else." Lex hesitantly cracked a smile, though his eyes dropped to look at the floor. "Anyway, the important thing is that we can face it together… right?" Lex's eyes snapped back up.

"You're just forgiving me like that? After what I said?"

"Yes."

"Why? Why, for god's sake?"

Clark didn't laugh this time, but he could feel the small smile on his face as he looked on at a truly bewildered Lex Luthor i.e. Clark Kent's body. Clark didn't really know where his next words came from, but they sounded like something that was concocted between his mom and dad, maybe at their best moments.

"I'm forgiving you because you don't think you should be forgiven."