Lex Luthor's tenuous relationship with sleep was reason enough for sharing a bed to be of the utmost significance. If vulnerability was what he hated more than anything, then sleep was to him the greatest of threats. It was only very recently that he again began seeing sleep as something valuable, and only in the presence of Claire Branigan.

However, this did not mean that sleep was always peaceful.

Lex had fallen asleep relatively early in the evening next to Claire in the master bedroom of the Lake House - following the revelations of the previous day, he was surprisingly exhausted by the sheer emotion of it. Now, well into the night, Claire was awoken by his fitful tossing and turning next to her, accompanied by incoherent mumbling. Still drowsy, Claire sat up in bed and rubbed her own eyes gently, processing in her mind what she was seeing before realizing it. Lex was having a nightmare.

She realized long ago that nightmares were the reason that Lex struggled to sleep - she imagined it had been this way for a long time, and that it had played a large role in his spiral into instability, but that his time in prison and in Arkham had only made it exponentially worse. The feeling of being constantly terrified and exhausted made that fall from the edge all but inevitable, Claire reasoned. Maybe, she thought to herself, she was trying too hard to be reasonable - to insert some sort of logic into whatever this was - but it was the best she could manage.

Knowing that it would likely make things worse if she did anything to startle him awake, she slowly leaned over and brushed his hair out of his face - the hair was clinging slightly to his forehead from perspiration, and Claire felt her throat tighten as she realized how sorely she hated seeing him this way. At the same time, however, she also realized that this was him. This was a part of him that existed before she had come. It wasn't for her to fix, but to weather alongside him now that she too was privy to the reasons why.

"Lex," she said gently, but with enough loudness to her voice to ensure that he heard her. "Lex, you're okay. Lex."

The repetition of his name, almost like a chant or like a beacon calling him home, seemed to register in his mind even as he slept - the writhing and the mumbling stopped, and his breathing steadied so that he was now simply laying on his side, sleeping restfully. Claire let out a sigh of her own relief.

Once she was assured that Lex was sleeping soundly, she slowly swung her legs over her side of the bed and got up, walking to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water, careful to make as little noise as possible.

It was a change, to say the least, to go from orbiting to being fully immersed in the inner sactum of Lex Luthor's secrets. She knew a great deal - too much, even - to be able to go back, and even more strange was the fact that Claire wasn't sure this bothered her at all. It should have. A small part of Claire felt she should have pushed back against the way her ties to Lex Luthor seemed to engulf her entire life, and yet she felt no inclination to. She took a long gulp from the glass of cool water and breathed deeply.

This meant something, she realized. It meant something significant and life-changing that she wasn't yet prepared to say in frank terms.

"Claire!"

The sound of her name being called from the bedroom made her jump slightly, nearly dropping the water in her hand. Alarmed, she hurried back down the hallway, her feet plodding gently against the Turkish rug that ran over the wooden floors until she turned the corner back into the bedroom where Lex now sat upright in bed, his face pale, his hands gripping at the sheets.

"What's going on?" Claire asked, clambering back into bed after placing the glass of water down on the bedside table. Lex's eyes, however, darted around fearfully and Claire could tell that he was still detached, perhaps not completely back into the waking world. "Lex?"

"You were gone," he mumbled, shaking his head with an expression that flickered with fear, with anger, with unease - almost as though he were going to be sick and was fighting it back mightily. "You were gone."

"No - Lex, no," Claire said, reaching out and grasping his hands. After giving them a brief squeeze, she laid his hands on the bed between them with his palms facing upward, then gently raking the tips of her nails over his hands. It was a motion that Lex usually found strange, but the small, almost tickling sensation was something that immediately seemed to ground him back into reality because it was so subtle, so gentle, yet at the same time so unusual. His face twisted into a slight frown and his gaze focused again on Claire, realizing that she was there, sitting in front of him. "I just went to get a drink of water," Claire explained, her voice even and void of both accusation and defense. She reached for the glass and held it in Lex's direction - he willingly took a drink.

"You understand that you're too valuable now to just disappear," Lex said, his voice low in what Claire knew was an attempt to sound ominous, to save face. "It's part of the deal now, Claire -"

"I'm not going anywhere," Claire interrupted, shifting so she was sitting cross-legged in front of Lex and able to lean towards him, again grasping his hands. "I'm not going to leave you. I just need you to trust me."

I need you to trust me.

It was easier said than done, but just the way it was said - not a command of trust me, but rather a plea for his trust - seemed to tumble and twist in Lex's mind as he strove to grasp it. Seeing his inner struggle, Claire shifted so her legs were bent at the knees and tucked under her.

Lex could tell she was tired too. Her eyelids were already drooping and she just as easily could have told him he was being ridiculous, that he should go back to sleep. He'd never been protected from his nightmares as a boy, so the idea of having a protector from them now when he was convinced he was no longer weak enough or vulnerable enough to need one left him feeling oddly shattered. Lex could see Claire fighting back sleep for him, and while it was a small gesture, it was one that he had never been on the receiving end of.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked finally, his face twisted into a slight frown. "What are you getting out of this?"

"I get to know that one of the most important people in my life is okay," Claire said simply.

Lex Luthor did not believe in selflessness. He did not believe that it was a trait that was inherent in people. It meant that the only possible conclusion was that Claire Branigan in his mind could be no ordinary person, which was well enough because he could accept an ordinary person as an equal. As a partner. But at the same time, a part of him held fast to the knowledge he had gained a long time ago, months ago onboard the Kryptonian vessel - the idea that something great and dark and destructive was coming that would render all things futile.

"There is no point to any of this. There's no purpose," Lex said, shaking his head and beginning to grow visibly agitated. "There's no sense in anyone trying to save anyone -"

"And I'm not in the business of saving people. Nobody is here forever," Claire said, her face calm. "But I figure if I make my not-forever and every not-forever my life touches a little less of a mess while I can, I don't know," she shrugged. "Maybe it'll leave a little bright spot in the fabric of time."

Lex's brow furrowed. Surely, his mind practically shouted, she couldn't be a real person. And like his mind did so many times when his own words and thoughts fell short of capability to describe the maelstrom of ideas swirling around his mind, he instead reverted to words already written:

"Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters," he recited again from memory, knowing that this piece at the very least - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - was one that Claire knew as well as he did. "I never saw one alive before."

"Well, now that we've seen each other," Claire said with a small laugh, tilting her head to one side and smiling as it dawned on her that Lex had chosen this particular passage for a reason, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you."

There was a pause, and Lex's brow furrowed again - he gave an anticipatory look and gestured outward with his hands. "You're forgetting the best part," he said, waving his index finger once in front of Claire, whose forehead wrinkled in slight confusion. Lex gave a small snort and shook his head.

"Is that a bargain?" he finished reciting, raising his eyebrows as though surprised that she would forget what he, the shrewd businessman he was, considered the most important part of the passage. She laughed again, but Lex gave her hands another urgent squeeze. "Is it?" he asked, straying now from the written word of Lewis Carroll and venturing into his own thoughts, speaking his own mind, asking his own questions. And Claire recognized the significant of this divergence from the canon, of this willingness to stand on his own thought.

"You've got yourself a deal," she said, now moving her legs out from underneath her and laying down comfortably on her side in bed, giving a small yawn and making a gesture beckoning for Lex to follow suit. He smirked slightly and laid down facing her, draping an arm lazily over her waist and resting his forehead against hers.

"Excellent," he said with a sleepy smirk - and within minutes, the pair had again succumbed to sleep, though now, restful and at peace.

Diana Prince was unsure of the value she ascribed to the chivalry inherent in the fact that her traveling companions insisted on her having her own room at the inn. Their boat was set to depart the next day for home, and she now sat alone in the room, contemplating what she very much regarded as a failure, even if she did not outwardly acknowledge it as such.

In all honesty, it was perhaps not so much that Diana strongly believed in people, but that she believed in duty, and the thought of having failed at a duty was not a failure she took lightly. Was fate so cruel, she wondered, as to have her survive among men for so many years and fail now?

It was a knock on her door that admittedly startled her slightly, and the lack of a voice identifying themselves left her feeling unsettled - at such a late hour, in such an isolated place, there were very few possibilities of who would be at her door. Her stance was defensive and prepared as she made her way towards the door, resting her hand gently on the handle and pulling it open in one swift movement.

"Mister Stone?"

"Victor. It's Victor," the large hooded figure in the doorway replied gruffly, walking through the door as Diana stepped aside to let him in, shutting the door behind him. "I'm here to hear you out, but I don't want your friends knowin' I'm here," he said, crossing him arms and facing Diana. "I hear one thing I don't like, and I walk."

"That is your right," Diana nodded graciously, taking a few steps closer to him. "Thank you for seeking me out, Victor."

"How did you know about me?" he asked, narrowing his eyes slightly. "The point of leaving was to disappear. Completely -"

"And for the most part, you did. But someone has been playing their cards well for a long time," Diana explained, striding across the room to where she kept the meager travel bag she carried on the journey that seemed an unseemly casing for any type of modern technology, but housed her laptop computer nonetheless. She booted up the computer and navigated to the now well-perused files from LexCorp, showing Victor the video footage of his father's documented attempts at saving him. Still wearing the hood over his head, Diana could still see his eyes clench shut at the sight of the machine - the Mother Box - taking over his body, and she realized it was perhaps the first time he had actually seen it. "Lex Luthor has been looking for us. For all of us," Diana explained. "But he came across something far more dangerous in his explorations. And it's coming -"

"From the same place that the Mother Box came from. I can feel it," Victor said, his lip curling into a slight sneer. While from what was visible of his real skin it was evident that he was still in fact a young man, there was a sense of weariness and weathered sadness to him that gave the semblance of age, very much the opposite of Diana's appearance of youth. She realized too that the merger between his own body and the Mother Box was not simply the attachment of missing parts like a bionic arm. It was a symbiosis. The Mother Box as itself another being that now shared a body with Victor Stone.

"You don't know where the Mother Box is?" Diana asked gently, her eyes squinting slightly as she asked. "You don't know where it might have gone?"

"If I did, I'd have finished the job of rippin' it to pieces," Victor retorted, the bitterness evident in his voice. "I don't know anythin' about where you'll find that thing, miss. I'm sorry."

"But you can help us," Diana insisted, reaching out and placing a hand on Victor's forearm - and though it was made of the same metal that seemed to have taken over much of his body, his reaction made it evident that he could still feel it. He stared at Diana questioningly, seemingly entertaining the thought for a moment before shaking his head and pulling his arm away from her.

"What for?" he asked. "Listen. If little piece of shit box from outer space can do this to me, we don't stand a chance against something much bigger," Victor insisted, his forehead contorting into a frown. "What do you think you're gonna achieve?"

"Mankind is a flawed race, but it has never been in their nature to lay down and die," Diana said fiercely, her eyes narrowing in response. "Your pain is your pain and I would never belittle it - you have suffered a great loss that no one so young should face," she said, drawing herself up to full height in front of Victor and squaring with him though statuesque as she was, she was still of smaller stature. "But if you feel that because you have suffered, the world owes you the freedom to forget your fellow man, then you were not a man yourself. And if that truth is more painful to you than what you have already endured, then you're free to go home. You're free to wallow in your pain until the time comes to lay down and die."

Enraged by her gall, Victor's fists clenched at his sides and briefly flinched as though he were tempted to strike, but Diana did not move. She did not so much as flinch in the face of being pummeled to death by a half-man half-machine, and out of sheer disbelief, Victor's fists again dropped to his sides.

"Who do you all think you are?" he asked, shaking his head and gesturing his arms out widely to the sides. "Some kind of... league of justice or something? Running around in disguise trying to right all wrongs and save the world?"

"I can think of worse ways to spend my days," Diana said simply, gracefully arching an eyebrow. "We may not win, but we will try. And we will be right."

"Right don't mean much when you're dead," Victor said flatly. "I saw what happened to your Superman. I don't give a shit if people build monuments to me when I'm not even around to see them."

"Neither did he," Diana said sternly. "He didn't care about the monuments. He cared about the people left to build them. He didn't care about being remembered, only about those who would be left to do the remembering. There was a woman he loved. Dearly," Diana said, pointing and jabbing a finger into Victor Stone's solid chest, realizing that her own eyes began to feel the pressure of tears. "But he died because he chose that over a world without her in it."

Since what had happened to him, no one had ever been angry with Victor Stone over his cynicism - his father allowed it, gave him the freedom to wallow in it. To now have this strange woman so frankly call him out on these things was foreign, yet somehow strangely freeing.

Diana Prince was the first person since all of this happened to treat him like a human again. Just this realization seemed to drain something from Victor. His shoulders slumped, and he dropped into a chair, shifting his weight so not to place all of his weight on the meager piece of furniture. There was truth in Diana Prince's tirade, and that was perhaps what was so draining. He had thought so little about what was true since they had come to this place. He had all but lost sight of what truth was.

"You have some kind of connection to this Mother Box," Diana said carefully, now kneeling in front of the younger man so not to lose eye contact with him as she spoke. "You carry it and its consciousness with you wherever you go."

"Anything it knows, I know," Victor confirmed with a slow nod.

"You may be the only one who can help us before it's too late," Diana said, her forceful tone now shifting to one of gentle, pleading negotiation. "And it may be futile. Many things leave very little mark on the fabric of the universe. But we can try. I am asking you to be a part of this," Diana said, again placing a hand on Victor's forearm. "So I will ask you again. Will you join us?"

For a short while, Victor was silent. He looked away for a moment, then back at Diana. His mind reeled. His free hand ran over the now-warm surface of metal that covered his face, lowering his hood and showing himself to Diana now before slowly nodding.

When he followed Diana out to the docks the next morning and boarded the strong-built boat alongside the team with hardly a word to anyone, Bruce Wayne mentally noted that if the team continued to grow at this rate, they were going to need a larger method of transportation.

A/N

Just a brief note which I didn't want to clutter the space before the story that I wrote the Lex/Claire scene at the beginning of this chapter to 'Never Gonna Leave This Bed' by Maroon 5 just in case you're into soundtrack/playlist recommendations. Also, more Lewis Carroll!

I also wanted to put it out there in response to a guest review I received today that I am completely, absolutely open to any feedback and advice you ma have on portrayals or characters, and I hope that if there is anything portrayed in a way that any of you feel iffy about, I would much rather hear it from you and work on improving it. That being said, I want to thank you all for your support like I always do. Work and things have been a little rough, but hearing from all of you absolutely makes my day brighter, which is why I try my best to update as frequently as I can.

It took me a while to decide the direction I go with things, but now that the Mother Boxes have come into play, the plot that ensues will kind of take elements from the cartoons, comics, and certain television shows to pepper into my own original storyline. So, I hope you're all along for the ride! Until next update, cheers!