There are many kinds of blindness. FutureFic. Lex, Chloe, Clark, Lana.
In Smallville canon, barring mind-wiping or a sudden attack of wilful blindness, Lex is going to figure out that Clark is Superman. But how? And what would turn him so completely against a friend?
Many thanks for this story go out to Bounce, Andraste, and Ebonbird, for beta'ing and not getting *too* annoyed that I kept sending one section back to them, slightly more modified each time.FADE TO BLACK
By Cherry Ice
He remembers her at dawn. Head tossed back, face creased with laughter. She was the first one he really laughed with, and if he thinks hard enough he can still feel the echoes; throat singing and mouth forced into a smile, but he can’t remember how it felt.
He’s forgotten how it feels to feel.
She believed in him when he didn’t believe in himself, and she stuck with him through each of his attempts to push her out. He loved her for that, and he hates himself for not being strong enough to drive her away.
He remembers cold feet against his legs at night. Pale hairs lying in stark contrast to his dark furnishings, all over the manor. The way her eyes showed everything, burning or laughing right along with her. They always picked up the sky, he remembers.
She saved him and she didn’t even believe it.
You saved yourself, she said. You’d have found your own way. She didn't see how his struggle to be anyone but his father would have turned him into the very man he was trying to escape. How he would have taken the fastest route away, letting some little moral thing fall through the cracks. How that one thing, that one, tiny little thing, would have widened the hole. How some small thing would fallen through that ever widening crevice each time he acted, until it sucked in everything he did and everything he was, and he was fighting with the very tools he was trying to escape.
And she’d laugh that laugh of hers, that little, self-depreciating laugh, and kiss him while he tried to find a way to tell her what she meant to him. That he’d been floating before her, spinning against what he wanted to be, no matter how hard he tried. He could never find the words. He’d try to explain and she’d shut him up with a kiss.
You didn’t need me, she said.
But he did and he did, and he still does.
He could never find the words.
He remembers one day, one perfect day, when the sky was clear and bright and high and the air bent the grass in waves. Just sitting on a hill, arms crossed beneath his head and her head pillowed on his chest. Her hands rested loosely at her waist. She watched the sky and he watched her, watched the curve of her cheek and the flickering of her eyelashes.
This is life, she said and turned towards him, propping an arm on his ribs. It was an old, familiar conversation. She hated idle minds. There always had to be something, some thing. She wouldn't let her mind rest, and when hers was in motion, his was as well.
Some part of him knew even then that life was the touch of her hand and the sound of her voice and the ghost of her kiss. They had this conversation a hundred, a thousand times, and with each exchange her words left fingerprints across his mind.
This is life, she said. Bluebird skies for as far as the eye can see.
And each cloud that enters with a silver lining? he teased. He knew she’d hate such simple words.
No. Clouds are clouds, but they fade out. They go away, unless you get lost in them. The night comes, but it goes again.
Sometimes, he replied, the night makes the day all the brighter.
Don’t embrace the night so that the day will be brighter, she said, and her voice was strangely serious, the sky reflecting out of her eyes. It always comes, Lex. The day will always come, because there is nothing that stops the world from turning.
People at the north pole might disagree with you, he smirked. How many weeks is their night?
She smacked his shoulder and he clutched at it in mock pain. Their days are just as long, though, she pointed. They spend as much time without the night as they do without the day. To stay in the night you have to try, because otherwise the world just whips you back around again.
She laughed and shook her head, her eyes regaining their focus. I don’t know what I’m on about, she said and he smiled and touched her face.
There are photos on his desk but he can barely see the images any more. They’re in his head, because that’s the only way for him to keep them. Chloe in the Torch office. Lana and Whitney kissing over the counter at the Talon. Chloe with her elbows on Clark’s shoulders, her chin on the top of his head, both of them making faces.
There’s one that’s in the back corner of his bottom left hand desk drawer. He and Chloe and Clark and Lana; and he knows without looking that that image is still crisp and clear. Chloe will be standing in the middle, an arm around both himself and Clark, straining because they’re so much taller than she is. Lana leaning in from the side, head tucked beneath Clark’s chin, her face still pretty and clear of the things that are to come.
They all look so young, so bright, so innocent. The events that will kill them all are still a week in the future. They have no idea that you can survive something without living through it.
A long time ago, the first whispers of a super hero in Smallville drifted over to him, each of his informants reporting something just this side or the other of the news brought by the man before. There had to have been a first one, once, one specific first one, but they're branched and woven in his mind, until he doesn't know where one ends and the next begins.
The widow Flannigan saved from her burning house by someone who moved faster than the eye could follow. The Johnsons' combine and swather pulled to safety after the field the father and oldest daughter were harvesting collapsed into the caverns that were rife in their area. Mr. Cleppety’s cat saved by a blur from a mutated coyote.
Lex would have thought that he would be the one consumed by it. He’d been searching for the truth for so long that something of this magnitude should have renewed his drive, honed his interest and dragged him into obsession.
Chloe was the one who spent sleepless nights with newspaper clippings and scientific journals, digging up reports from years before, surrounded by a small pool of light from a single lamp.
Once upon a time, he watched her as she sorted through journals, trying to find the roots of a story that soon became much more than her chance to write something that would have elite newspapers knocking down her door. Once, there was Clark's voice, low and and almost desperate, asking him to pull her back from it; and there was sitting in the dark, watching her as she worked in a puddle of lamp light, afraid to say something in case it made her leave. She never believed in how deep it ran between them.
He could never find the words. To tell her that it was self destructive, that it was consuming her. That she needed some space. Who was he to talk, he who had town the town apart because of a meteor? He could never make her see that she was his lifeline, his touchstone, his rock, so she could never never help him learn to stand on his own. She carried everything bright with her, everything good.
There is an impression in his mind of the day that that last picture was taken. It's in brass and velvet, lines etched clearly with a hidden violence. Chloe’s quick, bird-like movements as she ate his sundae. Lana’s smile, her eyes so clear. The way that she drew the gazes of the men in the diner, and he could only laugh and wrap his arm around Chloe, because their eyes missed the greatest of prizes. Clark’s old, beaten up jean jacket thrown across the back of the vinyl bench. Their waitress took the picture outside, against the swaying prairie fields and bluebird sky. You couldn’t see in the photograph that there were storm clouds gathering just outside the frame.
There are spaces in his memory where there is nothing. He curses them, because he wants every instant of her that he was given. He’s thankful for them because in one of the missing places there might be that one memory that would make it impossible for him to go on.
He remembers Clark’s still face. He remembers Lana’s sobs spilling into muffled keening. He remembers Chloe’s fingers around his. They must have been tight, and he must have been squeezing, because their knuckles were pale and tight, ever so tight.
Super heroes in Smallville.
Not so super.
Not fast enough. Never fast enough. Save Clark, save Lana, save him. Not enough time to save Chloe.
He doesn’t remember feeling any more. He’s forgotten what it’s like to feel and he’s forgotten all the things he’s felt before, except for her. All of his memories are dull. Shadow puppet shows that dance silently across his mind. He remembers and he sees, but he doesn’t feel. Sometimes he thinks it’s a blessing.
Chloe’s hand, tight in his. Still breathing, somehow still alive. She was holding his hands tight and he couldn't move. The movement of her chest, her poor chest, was shallow. He must have felt her breath on his cheek when he leaned over her. It must have brushed his skin in satin bursts, but he can't find the sensation in his mind, even when he searches hard and deep.
He remembers red.
Remember, she whispered. Promise me. Remember. You didn’t need me.
He shook his head. Shook it and felt something inside him tear even as his bluebird skies faded from her eyes. He couldn’t find the words to tell her that without her, it was empty. That without her, it was all for nothing.
You’ll be fine, she said, and she coughed, and all he could see was red.
He thought that he found the words then, but it was too late, because her hands fell from his.
HELP US! he remembers yelling. He’s told he hollered at the sky until Clark knocked him to the ground, but it’s another missing piece. He remembers Lana crouched by Chloe’s side, hair spilling over both of them as she pulled her hands to her chest.
She wasn’t allowed to be gone, not when he’d almost found the words. She wasn’t allowed to leave. She wasn’t allowed to leave. She wasn’t allowed to...
He remembers waking in the Metropolis General Hospital and trying to find his way back down into the void. It wasn't the tile roof that blocked out his bluebird skies, because Chloe alone had held them. She would have told Superman, told Clark, to leave her for last. And though she hadn’t, though she hadn't even had the chance, he had. Lex died that day. He ceased to exist and some part of him knew it, some place beneath Chloe’s voice telling him to go on, to live on.
He remembers Clark coming to visit him, sitting by his bed and not saying a word. He remembers that Clark’s eyes were the first thing to go. They were brown, and then they were grey. The colour on the cards by his bed. He didn’t notice it all in a place where everything was white.
The roses stayed red, and every time he looked at them he remembered Chloe’s blood on his hands.
There was a chair by his bed. He remembers thinking it an odd, faded, colourless grey, because it kept him from thinking that it was empty. Waking to card sitting on it, presumably moved when he was still dreaming, half delirious. White and cream and delicately embossed, it stood glaring at him from the non-colour of the seat. 'Best Wishes' 'All my best' 'Lionel'. The writing was the hand of his father's secretary.
He remembers Clark and his parents coming to get him when he was released from the hospital. Seeing that Martha Kent’s hair had gone grey. He remembers stepping through the sliding doors and realizing that the world had followed her example, shifting to shades of grey while the sky stretched in bright patches above the office buildings.
The doctors told him that it was the closest term they had for it was progressive colour blindness. The colour blind could still see colours, though they couldn't distinguish between certain shades. There wasn't this void of grey, this steady and irreversible loss of colour. They said meteor fallout was at the root, but their voices were not steady when they spoke. Perhaps reds and greens should have been the first to go, but they stayed until the last, forest fading to olive fading to dusty ivy fading to grey.
He remembers Chloe’s funeral. He watched from the trees, their branches shedding charcoal leaves around him, the only colour he could see the red of the roses on her coffin. He couldn’t go there, be among people playing grief at her passing when she’d never meant as much to them as she had to him. Couldn’t bear the comfort offered, because it was empty and it was pity. The rumours were better, the whispers that he had never really cared if he couldn’t even show up for her funeral.
He remembers Lana and Clark afterwards. Lana never came to see him. Clark could never met his eyes again, his hand on his arm cool and devoid of all comfort. Lana, with her movements jerkier and jerkier when she spoke, her eyes dull. Spilling coffee as she passed it over the counter at the Talon, driving home faster and faster each day, as if trying to out race it all.
That her truck was red has always stuck with him, because it still stood out in relief for him as his car screeched to a halt on the gravel road, dust in his mouth and on his skin as he slammed the door behind him. Blood on Lana’s forehead where it had met the windshield, seeping through the fractures drawn on the glass, tracing the cracks until it hung a cobweb red against the sky. Red on the telephone pole where the paint was scraped from the truck wrapped around it.
The flowers on Lana’s coffin were a pale grey that might have been blue, once upon a time.
He watched Clark through it all. He should have stepped in. He should have taken his friend by the hand and led him back to the light, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He watched as Clark's exposed emotions faded, were locked away and replaced with honour, duty and a burden that only seemed to grow. Watched as Clark changed, set himself apart, until he hardly seemed human. He helped him get a job at the Daily Planet, living Chloe’s dream, because it evened the score.
It was a spot that had been left empty at the death of a hot prospect from a small town.
His memories faded with his vision. Lost their colour and their life until they were nothing but backdrops for thoughts of her.
He remembers the first time he saw Superman. Red cape snapping in bright relief against the cloud. Chest branded with an 'S,' mocking him with its colour. He remembers these, and he remembers the city air thick in his lungs, and he remembers the cheers of the throng and those eyes that were the first colour he ever lost.
He should have died that day. He did die that day. They all died that day.
He died that day, but she hadn’t needed to.
Clark should have known that. He should have been able to *see.* See beyond the moment and think of how this would all play out, how her death would tint everything. He was supposed to be their friend and he should have been able to see.
How do you worship someone who holds responsibility for the death of the only person who’s ever been that important to you? Who was everything to you?
How do you sit and watch him gain acclaim and love, adoration, when he traded your life for a life worth so much more? As good as killed her, is all he can think. Chloe was life and love and bluebird skies and she took them with her when she left.
He remembers losing red. It went gradually. It was bright, and it was constant, and it was there. One day it was heart’s blood, crimson, and then it was gone.
He remembers her blood on his hands, but all he sees is silver. Silver, mercury. Mercury on his hands and all over his skin, killing him slowly. But he’s already dead.
Lex wonders if Superman bleeds red. He wonders if he knows that he killed him all those years ago. He wonders if, if, if, if Superman bleeds red, will it bring it all back? Will he see red again? Maybe, Chloe’s blood would turn from mercury to red and bring all the colours back, so her hair could be gold in his mind instead of pale against his couch, he could feel her lips gentle against his palm, see her eyes full with their everything, with all he could be and everything bright about him.
Maybe he could see a bluebird sky again. Maybe it would open up above him, bright and shining and free him from his night. Maybe, just maybe, he could have one last shining moment of existence before it pierced the dark and ate his soul with its sudden brilliance.
And he could move on.
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