A/N: I'm a little late on this. Ran out of queued chapters as I got sick, then realized I'd messed up my outlined and had to refigure the ending . . . Well, I should be good to go for the coming weeks now. Love hearing your thoughts!

Chapter 44 - Test Subjects

Investigating Lex's projects was more difficult than Clark had expected.

The labs had, of course, been relocated from when his mom had worked at them and from when Clark himself had been a part of them, so he couldn't simply return to the same place where they had worked before. He might have tried, as he had when the two sides were separate, to simply reach out to Lex, except that Lex wouldn't reply to him. He knew where Lex's living spaces were, but these days, all of the entrances were loaded with Kryptonite. Part of Clark wanted to somehow get a warning out to Lex's staff that they were at risk of being infected, but in reality, they probably weren't taking much more of a risk than they had been just living in Smallville in the first place.

He did try to locate the labs by brute force, running through the more remote places in town and the surrounding cities faster than the human eye could see and using his X-ray vision. But Lex must have learned, knowing Clark's weaknesses. He'd either lined any telling areas with lead, or chosen locations just populated enough to give Clark a difficult time passing through, or both. Checking populated areas was difficult and time consuming, because it made it harder to use his speed. He might have been able to run fast enough that the human eye wouldn't process the blur, but that didn't make it safe to run through a crowd that would feel the rush of air as he passed. There was too much risk of drawing suspicion, or worse, of running into someone.

Research was safer. He and Chloe spent a lot of time reaching out to leads, talking to people who worked at LuthorCorp or who had been affiliated with the Luthors in the past. Unfortunately, most people didn't know anything about any secret projects, and those that seemed to know something didn't want to talk. LuthorCorp was big enough that there were a lot of leads to check, but every last one so far had been a dead end.

Clark kept his parents in the loop as he worked. He'd learned his lesson from the many times he'd tried to keep things from them, and they'd expected no less than that he would be keeping an eye on Lex, considering the state he was in. The only thing he kept secret from them was the fact that Chloe had been working with him. He decided that that part was her business, not his secret to tell.

It was the day after Christmas when they finally secured the lab's location.

Clark had continued working on the project through the holidays. Normally, Christmas time would have been very busy at the Kent house, but there hadn't been much of a celebration; after Thanksgiving ended in tears, none of them felt like celebrating. They hadn't bothered with a tree, or decorations, or gifts, or parties, allowing the season to pass quietly rather than drawing their attention to it. The only reason he even knew it was the day after Christmas was that Chloe had been unavailable for the past few days, spending time with her family.

Still, she was the one who came out to the barn with a smug grin on her face, carrying a slip of paper with an address.

"Tell me I'm good," she said, handing it over with a flourish.

He looked at the slip of paper, and his eyes widened when he realized what it was. "You're sure this is it?"

"Not a shadow of a doubt."

"How did you get this? Have you been inside?"

"Not here, no. But I've spent a lot of time in the mansion."

"In the mansion?"

"Lex is in and out."

"Chloe, that wasn't worth the risk. You should have brought me."

"Well, I'm fine, aren't I? Besides, I had other reasons to be there. Reasons his security guards sympathized with."

"What reasons are those?"

"I'll let you know if my plan works."

Clark didn't like that, but he focused on the matter at hand. "It's the day after Christmas. Do you think there'll be staff at work?"

"Given the way Lex has been acting these days, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't take Christmas off."

Clark winced. He had been overly focused on securing a location, but knowing where the labs were wouldn't help much if they couldn't get in.

"We can go tonight? There should be less security."

He nodded. "Okay. But you've taken enough of a risk. I have to do this one on my own."

She scoffed. "Excuse me? You're cutting me out?"

"Trust me. It's for your own safety."

"I don't know where you've been, Clark, but that's not how we do things."

"Chloe, this isn't some meteor mutant. I've seen the kinds of projects Lex works on. This could be dangerous."

"Lex doesn't want anything from me. But you..." She bit her lip, then she looked him in the eyes. "You can protect me if anyone tries to hurt me, but if anyone comes up to you, I have to be able to get help."

He stared at her for a long moment. She didn't know his secret. He was sure he had never slipped up in front of her, and no one who knew would have told her. But she was talking an awful lot like she knew exactly what was going on. The truth is, he didn't know What was going to happen. Lex hadn't reached out to their family to try to hurt anyone or bother them, but if Clark interfered in his operations, would he lash out and hurt Clark? At one time, he had technically done experiments on Clark. It had always been with Clark's consent, but he had also manipulated Clark into giving a lot more of himself than he ever would have been willing to give. Clark had to stop himself from running a hand over his own chest. The damage from that drill may have been healed as soon as the kryptonite was taken away, but the memory of that pain had remained for much longer, keeping him awake into the night.

It wasn't impossible that going in there would subject him to the possibility of becoming a lab rat. Chloe wasn't in the same danger. And she was probably right. He could probably protect her; she could probably report back if anything bad happened to him.

Probably. But he wasn't willing to take that chance. She was in deep enough. And this wasn't even her fight.

"No," he said finally.

"You can't force me to stay behind."

"I'm not forcing you. I'm asking you. He's my brother. At least let me scope it out."

"Clark..."

"You went into the mansion without me. I promise I'll bring you in if there's anything you can do. But just for tonight, let me go alone."

Her eyebrows furrowed, but she finally nodded.


Out of reflex, Clark started to make plans to sneak out of the house. Then he remembered how well that usually went, and he instead told his parents his plans. It meant he had to put up with a lot of questioning, but it also meant that if he didn't come home the next morning, they would know exactly where he'd last been and be able to at least make an effort at sending for help.

Clark left the house at one in the morning. As predicted, there were guards posted at every entrance, kryptonite around every corner, and lead lining most of the walls.

So Clark did something he'd never done before. He approached from beneath.

He started a quarter mile away, digging easily into the hard soil with his hands, and made himself a tunnel, leading him under the lab. There was no way he was going to be able to fill it in well enough to completely hide his tracks, but beginning the tunnel some distance away would make it difficult for anyone to tell what he'd done.

It was dark from below the lab. He hadn't thought to bring a flashlight; he was operating purely on instinct, on his sense of direction. But he got lucky. Nobody had thought to line the floors with lead.

It was well lit inside the lab itself, though. Well enough that he could see everything that was going on. Some of the rooms were just computers; others were chemistry labs. There were quite a few kryptonian symbols around. But most of it didn't look like anything he hadn't seen before.

Except for one room.

It looked a lot like a jail, but with more cells than he had seen at the jail in Smallville. Most of the cells were filled. A few people, he recognized. Meteor mutants he had encountered in the past. Lindsay, the girl who had claimed to be his relative from Krypton. People he didn't know.

Outside of the cells, the room was full of medical supplies. Heart monitors, tubes and wires, probes and wires, all the same kinds of testing equipment Lex had used on Clark with his permission. But based on the locks and the looks on the inmates' faces, Clark doubted Lex had any of their permission.

The biggest addition was the racks of syringes, filled with a glowing green liquid.

Clark fought back a gasp, despite the fact that no one would have heard him, and he ran for home, only just stopping for long enough to roughly fill in the tunnel he'd left behind.