Chapter 35 - Precipice

Lex added Mrs. Kent's medical file to his Room of Obsession, but since stealing it, he hadn't had time to look it over thoroughly. He had worse problems to deal with.

Helen's ex-boyfriend, Paul Hayden, came into town. According to Helen, he'd beaten the girlfriend he had before her, and she'd broken things off before she became his next victim.

When Hayden started stalking Helen, Lex's darker side didn't have to suggest killing him. It was already on his mind, especially when he showed up at the hospital badly injured and tried to pin it on Lex. Helen almost believed him, too, and Lex didn't blame her, since he'd been so seriously considering committing the crime of which Hayden was now accusing him.

Lex tried to keep his mind off it. He knew Helen could take care of herself, and that eventually she would figure out what had really happened. He focused on his work at the plant, and he filled up some of his spare time taking care of Lana and helping her learn to defend herself—she'd been attacked at the Talon, and she was jumping out of her skin every time she heard a noise behind her. Working with her in the mat room was the longest his other side had spent in silence since before Lex's fallout with the Kents. He was starting to think maybe he could fight it without them.

Then Hayden attacked Helen.

It was the first time in his life that Lex fully believed his darker side when it said they were one and the same. Lex only just managed to arrive in time to find her, broken and bloodied, an inch from death. Once he was sure that the doctors had what they needed to save her, he grabbed two guns and tracked down Hayden.

Somehow, Clark got involved, as he always did when something dangerous was happening in Smallville, or something immensely personal in Lex's life. Lex wondered if part of Clark's secret involved some kind of magic radar for trouble. Lex managed to shake Clark off just before reaching Hayden.

Lex and Hayden fought in an abandoned train car. Lex was thankful he'd been practicing hand-to-hand combat recently, or he might have lost the fight. Finally, he stood over Hayden with the gun, finger on the trigger.

His hands shook.

A long silence passed before the voice screamed, "Do it!"

Hayden deserved it. He was a predator.

"Then do it!"

No one would know it hadn't been self defense.

"He almost killed Helen!"

This was for Helen. The woman he loved. The woman who had forgiven so many of his faults already.

"NOW, LEX."

She deserved better than Lex. Better than a murderer.

He couldn't do it. He wouldn't.

He hit Hayden in the face with the gun. Clark entered a moment later, and the Sheriff a few second after that. Lex was able to claim he was just making a citizen's arrest.

He could see in Clark's eyes that Clark didn't believe him, but he didn't care.

"What was the point in that?" The darkness berated Lex non-stop on the car ride back from the scene with Hayden. "You should have killed Hayden!"

"I couldn't," Lex said aloud. "Helen would know it wasn't self defense."

"He tried to kill her! She would want him dead, too!"

"I don't think she would. And she deserves better than a murderer."

"I've killed before."

"That was in defense."

"Julian wasn't."

Lex was silent for a long time. He didn't have any excuse for that. The truth was, he had no idea why he had killed Julian. He didn't even remember doing it. He had only a vague memory of his father hitting him in the face so hard that he'd fallen and hit his head. "That was an accident," he finally said. "Killing Hayden would have just been a crime."

"Keeping yourself pure for her, Lex? What's the point in that?"

"LEAVE ME ALONE. I love her. I don't want to hurt her."

Miraculously, the voice was silent after that.

As much as he still pined after the Kents and missed them every day, maybe he didn't need them to help him fight his darker side. Maybe he just needed Helen.

That was when he knew.

He proposed to her the next night. Her eyes sparkled when he revealed the ring and asked the question. He couldn't remember ever having been so radiantly happy in his entire life as he was in that moment.

As she caressed his face and kissed him, slowly and passionately, it crossed his mind, just for a brief moment, that he was going to have a wedding party of exactly zero.

Clark looked shaken when he returned from the hospital, where he'd gone to check and make sure Helen was okay. Martha sat him down at the kitchen table to decompress and busied herself in the kitchen for a little while to give him time to process. While Lex always wanted to talk as soon as he reached the house—if he was going to talk at all, that was—Clark tended towards needing time to think before he could express himself.

Martha was really starting to worry about Clark. Worrying about Lex was a given—it had been almost two months since Martha had been able to contact him—but that time had been awfully hard on Clark as well, even aside from missing his brother.

First, there had been his conflicts with Lana, which she knew affected him more than he let on. There was the week she'd spent sick and dying in the hospital, and he'd ended up with the same illness she had. There had been the message from the spaceship, which had made Clark the second of her sons to worry he might be destined for evil. Then he'd thought he'd found someone from Krypton, which turned out to be false, and finally, Lana had been attacked at the Talon.

Throughout everything, Martha held her youngest son, made sure he was eating, and encouraged him as much as she could, but it was just too much stress. It wasn't good for him. And her sympathetic stress for both Clark and Lex couldn't be good for the baby, either

But today, Clark's expression was different. It wasn't the exhausted, weighed-down look he'd taken up lately. It was more of a disturbed look, like he'd seen something he didn't want to see.

It took effort not to gather him into her arms and ask him to open up right away, but Martha left him alone to think until Jonathan had entered the room. Jonathan gave Clark's shoulders a couple of pats before sitting down across from him, and Martha sat beside him.

Clark looked back and forth between his parents. "Have either of you been able to talk to Lex?"

Martha shook her head. "We've tried, sweetie. He doesn't want to talk to us, and we can't force him."

"Did you see him tonight?" Jonathan asked.

Clark nodded, looking away from both of them. "I saw him standing over Paul Hayden with a gun."

Martha's jaw dropped. She felt sick.

Jonathan's eyebrows knitted. "Paul Hayden . . . he's the one who attacked Helen?"

"That's what Lex said," Clark said.

Martha's voice caught in her throat. "W-what happened? Did he shoot him?"

"No. It looked like he'd just knocked him out with the gun. Sheriff Adams showed up to arrest Paul after that, and Lex said he was making a citizen's arrest. But Mom, if you saw the look in his eyes . . ." Clark shook his head.

She gently covered his hand with hers.

"Did you get to talk to him?" Jonathan asked.

"No. He still didn't want to talk to me." Clark swallowed hard. "Lex and Paul were fighting inside this train car. I looked inside with my x-ray vision, and one of them was standing over the other with an axe. I don't know who was who, but I slammed the train car so they both fell. Then I ran inside, and that's when I saw Lex with the gun."

Martha took a deep breath. It sounded like either Lex had been defending himself, or he really had simply gone after Helen's attacker. She really couldn't say which was more likely.

"Did he look hurt?" She couldn't help but ask.

"No," Clark said. "He didn't look good, though. I'm worried about him."

"I know, sweetie."

"If I hadn't said all those things to him when I was on red kryptonite—"

"Clark, it's not your fault." Jonathan had switched into his authoritative voice. "This was going to happen eventually."

"So, what? Is this going to happen with all of my friends? I don't want to be alone, Dad."

"I know, son," Jonathan said. "And you won't be alone. Some of your friends will be like Pete, and they'll find out your secret anyway. And they'll be loyal to you until the end. Some will be like Lana. You'll struggle, but at the end of the day, you'll always care about each other. Some will be like Chloe—Chloe knows you're not telling her everything, and she's asked some questions, but she's okay with the parts of you she knows." He sighed. "And some will be like Lex. They'll have . . . difficulty with trust, and you'll have to part ways for awhile until they can sort out their thoughts."

Clark grimaced. "So unless I want to endanger myself and them, I can only be close with people who are okay with being lied to."

Martha's eyes fell closed. She knew that wasn't what Jonathan had meant, but it was too close to the truth for her to deny.

"Come here." Martha took his arm and stood beside him, and waited for him to stand as well. She wrapped her arms around him and held him close.

"I miss Lex," he whispered.

"Me too, baby." She rubbed his back, aware of the irony of the endearment, considering he was towering over her.

He let go after a minute and stepped back. "I have to catch up on homework. I'll be in the loft," he said.

"Okay," Jonathan said. "And son?"

Clark looked up at him.

"You're not alone. You will always have us."

Clark half smiled. "Thanks, Dad." He left through the side door.

Martha turned to Jonathan, who was still seated at the table. "I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing."

Jonathan rubbed the back of his neck. "This kind of parenting is a bit over both of our heads."

"I feel like we've failed both our kids."

Jonathan's brow furrowed. "Martha . . ."

"Clark's brokenhearted. And I don't think Lex is going to come back."

"You don't know that."

"I broke my promise to him." Her voice cracked.

"I heard the promise you made," Jonathan said. "You said you'd be there to pick up the pieces. You were there for him for as long as he let you."

"I promised I'd never let him fall." Her eyes stung, for what felt like the millionth time in the past month. "I promised I'd never let the darkness take him over."

"You don't know that it has, sweetheart."

"It's been almost two months. And he almost killed someone today."

Jonathan's face was blank. "We tried. We did everything we could do."

She shook her head over and over. She hadn't promised she would try. She'd promised she would save him.

"You were right, Jonathan," Martha said. "You were right all along."

He looked up at her, eyebrows raised.

"He needed more help than we could give. Why did we think we could help him?"

His jaw tensed.

"He's not coming back, Jonathan. We failed."

Something shifted in Jonathan's eyes. He stood suddenly, grabbing the fruit basket from the center of the table and throwing it across the room, where apples and oranges flew.

"Jonathan!"

"He's going to come home, Martha, he has to."

Martha's breath caught.

"You loved that kid. Heck, I loved him."

"We were never going to be able to save him. We were always bound to hurt ourselves trying."

"I don't care!" He threw aside a chair, which clattered to the floor. "If we even bought him a couple of weeks, that was worth . . . any amount of pain . . ." Jonathan paced, running his hands through his hair.

Martha hadn't seem him this angry and violent since he found the watch Lionel had given her. That time, she'd been scared of him. Right now, she felt like she'd never loved him more.

"He was our son, he . . ." Jonathan came to a stop at the table and rested both hands on it, breathing hard.

Her head hung, and warm tears slid down her face.

"Can't we force him? We'd never let Clark avoid us for this long. We'd go after him with green kryptonite."

She shook her head. "Clark's still a kid. Lex is an adult."

"But . . ." Jonathan rubbed his face. "They're both our sons."

"I know."

His eyes shone. "I want my son back, Martha."

"I know." Slowly, hesitantly, Martha stepped into his arms and buried her face in his chest. "I know."