Author's Note: Continuation of last chapter. Still AU & angsty. -DMH

It was a little after two in the morning when her phone rang that Saturday.

"Hello?"

"Can you come get me?"

"Sam?"

She could guess his next words, almost mouth them exactly. "I fucked up. I'm sorry."

Hang up the phone. Go back to sleep. It should have been that easy. It was two in the morning. "Where are you?"

She called her mother, begged her mother to look after Sammy.

You should be ashamed of yourself. Her mother didn't have to say the words for Mercedes to hear them. She felt them.

Her mother's voice was resigned and quiet only because her husband was sleeping next to her and he had an early shift in the morning. Mercedes knew this and felt selfish.

Waking her little boy up was the worst of it. After packing a bag for him, she sat him up on his Superman sheets and steadied his teetering body with one hand while putting his tiny feet into socks and shoes with another. He sucked his thumb drowsily, attempted to keep his eyes open to see what she was doing, but she didn't even know what she was doing.

She could have killed herself when a sob suddenly escaped her. She bit the inside of her cheek until the kind of pain she was feeling was eclipsed by the physical. That was a much easier pain to handle. She picked the four year old up and cradled him to her chest. "Come on, little boy."

It only took ten minutes of navigating naked streets to reach her parents' house. Sammy was asleep again when she pulled into the drive, so she carried his deadweight up the steps and to the front door, stroking her fingers down his loosely hanging limbs and rubbing her cheek against his. Her mother was already standing in the doorway, so when she reached the porch, the screen door swung open and Sammy was pulled away from her as easily as a ragdoll.

"You can come and get him when that man is out of your house," was all her mother said before the door closed in her face. She rushed back to the car in need of an enclosed space, some kind of shelter with walls that she could lean on.

She didn't cry.

She found Sam sitting on a curb with his head in his hands, parked the car and waited until he looked up and recognized her. It took him five minutes to even register that there was a car next to him. When he finally climbed in, he didn't look at her and muttered a few words that she was pretty sure that even he didn't understand.

She took him home and helped carry him in.

She left the lights off. She didn't want to see anymore of him than what she already had. The rings around his eyes were astonishingly black even in the dark of night and they made his eyes so pale and green. Wounded. She felt weak just catching glances of them during the ride to her place, so there was no way she could look at them in a bright room. His head probably couldn't take it anyway. He rubbed at his temples as he sat on the armrest of the couch, watching her set up some blankets and pillows.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"Did you take something?"

He sighed heavily and wrapped his shaking arms around his middle. She winced when she realized he had lost weight since the last time she had seen him. "I just drank."

"And what else?"

He frowned as if offended by her accusing tone, but replied, "I smoked a little."

"That's it?" She glared at the frustrated huff he let out.

"There might have been something in it." He shrugged. "I dunno. I'm tired."

She straightened the sheet under her hands one last unnecessary time and stood to leave, but his hand wrapped around her wrist and tugged her. His grip was weak, but she still blamed it as the reason she walked back to him. He climbed off the couch and lowered himself to his knees on the floor.

"Sam…" He had his arms coiled around her middle before she could even think to pull away. He pressed his face into her soft stomach with a content sigh and all the tension that stiffened his shoulders released from his body and soaked into hers.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she told him, rubbing her hand over his hair, brushing it from his closed eyes so she could remind herself how tired he was, how frail and broken. "C'mon, Sam," she whispered, moving them until she was sitting on the bed she'd just made for him and he was still mostly on the floor, save for his head in her lap and the arms wrapped around her.

She waited until after he fell asleep to cry.

They were both tired. They would talk in the morning.

No use showing him what his kryptonite eyes could do to her now.