Chapter 21 - Unexpected

Lex stood from where he had been kneeling beside the hospital bed. He wasn't sure how long he'd been weeping, and he felt like he needed to get up and tell the doctor, or his mom, but he also wondered if he really needed to do any of that. None of this was real.

And yet… It was real. It was going to be, anyway, if he did what he needed to fight the dark side.

He needed to finish the dream. Maybe there was still a twist ending coming, but he couldn't imagine what it would be. His father was dead.

He still hadn't quite figured out his next steps when he turned to find his biological mother standing behind him.

"What did you do to him?" His voice betrayed him, and he couldn't stop the tears that flowed, tears of both grief and frustration. "Why didn't you stop this? I thought you were showing me a better life!"

Her voice remained calm, unshakable. "I was, Lex. I am."

"A life where my father dies? A life full of pain?"

"No, Lex. A life full of love."

"Love? My father is dead and I couldn't do anything to stop it!"

She didn't say anything. She just took his hand.

Lex pulled away, turning back toward his father. Why would Lilian have shown him this? Did she think that this would convince him to fight harder against his inner demons? All it did was give him an impossible choice. His sanity, or his father's life.

And come to think of it, this vision didn't even make a lot of sense. He still wasn't convinced that giving up his wealth would actually destroy the dark side in the first place; it really didn't seem like the money was a big enough help to his darkness. It helped both sides.

Beyond that… how was his biological mother even here? She was dead. And Lex didn't believe in ghosts. Even if she was some sort of ghost that could see into his dreams, could she know the future?

Maybe somehow giving up his wealth really would defeat the darkness. Maybe dream-traveling ghosts were real. Maybe she knew the future. But that didn't answer the much stranger, much more troublesome question, the question he'd started with: why on earth would she show him this? Unless...

Unless somehow, it wasn't her.

Slowly, Lex turned back to look at the face of the woman he had desperately missed for the last ten years of his life. "You didn't show me this to try to convince me to fight. You weren't smart enough to avoid Lionel, but you also weren't stupid enough to think that this would inspire me. So why did you do this?"

"Lex… "

"What? What? How did you even get here in the first place? Answer me that. You're dead. You've never made contact before. Is it because I'm in a coma? Do you have some sort of… magic powers that let you hop from one person's head to another, but if only if they're far enough gone?"

"Sweetheart, be reasonable."

"I'm trying to be reasonable. I'm trying to make sense of any of this. If you could get me a message—which I still don't understand—it wouldn't be this. It would never be this." He stood up a little straighter. "So who are you? Because you're not my mother."

"Lex!"

"Who the hell ARE you? Because if I didn't know any better, I would think that you were trying to convince me to give up the fight altogether. Almost like you're..." His voice caught, and he took a step back. "No."

Lilian froze. She let out her breath, and she transformed.

A translucent cloud of smoke spun around her, and left in her place an exact copy of Lex himself. It was like looking in the mirror.

Lex narrowed his eyes. "You."

His darker side smirked and shrugged. "It was worth a try."

"I'm going to stop you. I'll kill you!"

His darkness laughed. "I'd like to see you try," he said.

Lex lunged for his other half, but he disappeared.

And then the dream dissolved.


A day passed. And then another.

Clark couldn't handle the uncertainty. He couldn't tell his parents what was going on, and he couldn't know whether the black kryptonite was having any effect on Lex until he woke up. Assuming he woke up at all.

This was his family. He couldn't leave it to chance.

Lots of people in town had been infected by kryptonite, with a variety of effects, but not everyone had been infected, despite exposure. Usually, something had to spark the infection. Sometimes it was ingestion—Clark thought about grinding up the black kryptonite and putting it into Lex's IV bag, but he doubted he could do that without anybody noticing, since it would definitely change the color of the liquid. Sometimes people were infected when the kryptonite ended up under their skin somehow. Again, Clark couldn't bring himself to do that to Lex. He was already pretty unstable from the gunshot wound; Clark didn't need to be adding any more injuries on top of that.

But then, a few people had been infected because of electricity…

Clark set the thought aside for a moment. If he wasn't willing to break his brothers skin, the last thing he needed to be doing was electrocuting him. That would be much more dangerous.

But then, it was the shortest way of ensuring that the infection occurred. And he could keep the current low—it was a lot easier to control that, assuming he had some sort of generator, than to stem bleeding from a cut. Besides, even if it didn't work, electricity didn't leave any marks. Knives did.

And as a side effect, it might even revive his brother from his coma…

For the thousandth time since Lex had been shot, Clark desperately wished he could talk to his parents, or his brother, about what he was thinking about doing. But he was afraid of losing his nerve.

And he didn't have much else to lose.

It wasn't difficult to find a small generator in the hospital, after he broke a few locks and snuck into a few places, fast enough that any security cameras wouldn't pick him up. It was a little more challenging to make sure no one would walk in on him while he was conducting the experiment. He chose a time shortly after a nurse had come in to check on Lex, and he used his super hearing to make sure the area was clear before connecting electrodes to his brother and taping the other ends to the black kryptonite, so the electricity would pass through the stones before making its way to Lex.

The next challenge was figuring out how to use the generator. He made sure all of the knobs were turned all the way down before he flipped the power switch, but then turning the knobs up, the read outs still pointed to 0 V and 0 A. He frowned down at the black kryptonite. Maybe it wasn't conductive. He had learned a little bit in school about conductors and insulators, and if the rocks didn't want to conduct, it would take a lot more electricity to force power through them.

Slowly, slowly, he turned the dials on the generator, cranking them further and further up, even as the read out continued to display zero.

And then, it happened.

There was a huge spark, and it looked almost like lightning was passing over and through the black rocks. Lex's entire body jolted, and the shock caused Clark to jump back.

The generator crackled and went dead, a little bit of smoke billowing out from the edges, and the electricity stopped.

Clark pulled himself up right and blinked a few times at what he saw.

This was going to be a huge problem.