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Title: Hero
Author: Quad
Summary: I really like the episode 'Nemesis' in which Clark and Lex get stuck in the tunnels near Reeves Dam and they're trying to help each other get out. However, I feel like it was too late in the Clark-Lex relationship for that experience to really have an impact on how either of them thought of the other. Lex was too resentful of Clark and Clark had pretty much given up on Lex it seemed. They both got out of the tunnels and went right back to hating each other without ever understanding anything about the other person. It made me kind of sad.
Then I got to thinking: what if Chloe had found Lex in the tunnels instead? I have to admit that I've very recently become more and more interested in a Chloe-Lex relationship 'cuz: A. I think Chloe is awesome and B. I think Lex is also awesome (in his own way) and C. I think there was a lot of potential between them even though I don't mind that the potential was never explored on the show.
So, long story short (but not really that short), I wanted to write an "AU" one-shot of what Nemesis would have been like if Chloe had found Lex instead of Clark. Not surprisingly, my "one shot" doesn't really look like it's going to be a "one shot" anymore because I wanted to stay true to the characters and I didn't see either Chloe or Lex changing significantly in the twenty minutes they had down in the tunnels before the big ka-boom! So I might write more of this, I'm not sure! Still, I wanted to post this first bit anyway. I hope you guys like it!
Note: this really is just one big conversation between the two characters with their own thoughts into the situation. As such, it jumps between POV of the two characters and I tried to clearly demarcate these with "page breaks" so I hope that doesn't get too confusing!
Disclaimer: Typical disclaimers apply: Smallville is not mine, the characters are not mine, the awesomeness is not mind, just the words are.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
Hero - Nemesis-Rewrite
Chloe wasn’t exactly the most rational person in times of panic, and she knew that. She had one big weakness—Clark—and if there was any chance that he would be in danger, she dove head-long into a situation without thinking things through. She liked to justify her actions by believing she was protecting Clark, but how much help could a little, five-foot-five, reporter be to an alien with an arsenal of powers that humans couldn’t even dream of? After all, she could barely throw a punch to save her own life, let alone catch automobiles mid-air or put fires out with a sneeze. She wasn’t much help to Clark out on the field, she knew that, so she had resorted to helping him the best way she knew how: with computers and resources. She left the heavy-lifting—literally—to him.
Most of the time… until she found out that Clark might be in trouble. Then logic goes out the window.
She might have made her stupidest move today, she realized. Even as she ran through the cold, damp tunnel with her heart racing, she knew that she couldn’t leave Clark down here. The moment she had seen the kryptonite dust on the rescue team’s vests, she knew he was in serious trouble. So logic went out the window.
“Clark!” She called, hearing her voice echo through the tunnels. “Clark, where are you?”
She arrived at a T-junction and looked both ways wildly. “Clark! You have to help me find you, dammit—“
Suddenly, an explosion rumbled through the tunnels somewhere deep to the left. She stumbled to her knees as the ground shook, releasing debris from the ceiling. She watched the walls with wide eyes, waiting for them to come crashing around her, but they didn’t… not yet. The image of being buried under the rocks was too vivid in her mind though, making her throat tighten. She wasn’t necessarily claustrophobic, but what human being felt save when the world may collapse around them at any moment?
Stop thinking about that, she told herself firmly. You have to find Clark! “Clark!” She yelled again, taking the path to the left. The fluorescent lights were flickering over her head, throwing the tunnels into eerie shadows. The ground was still trembling slightly, or maybe that was just her bones clacking together in panic. She kept running ahead, following the tremble back to its origin until she found the site of the explosion. A mountain of rubble dotted with green meteor rocks had blocked off the tunnel before her, but surely Clark couldn’t have made it this far given the rest of the tunnels were laced with the same? “Clark!”
She heard someone cough on the other side. “Chloe?”
She froze as she recognized the voice. It wasn’t the one she had been hoping to hear. “Lex, is Clark with you?” She leaned down in front of the rocks, trying to find a hole that she could look through. Lex seemed to have done the same because she soon found herself peering through a sizeable gap at his sweaty, dirty face.
“Why would Clark be here?” Lex asked incredulously. “Chloe, what are you doing here?”
“Clark came down here looking for you and I came down here looking for Clark—“
“Chloe, it doesn’t matter,” Lex cut her off. “You have to get out of here.”
“Listen, Lex, I’m not too thrilled to be down here myself and helping you was the last thing on my to-do list today, so far down that it might not even be on the list actually, but you obviously need help so stop being all stoic—“
“Chloe!” Lex shouted, making her jump. “This place is rigged to blow up in less than twenty minutes! Get out now!”
Chloe’s eyes widened as his words sunk in but it took her only a second to make her decision. “Not without you and Clark,” she replied firmly. “Now, come on, Lex. You can squeeze through here.”
Lex shook his head, gritting his jaw. “Find Clark and get out of here. I can find my own way out—“
“Lex, I swear to God, I hate you so much right now that if you give me any reason to leave you behind, I probably will so stop arguing with me and get the hell out of there. I am not leaving you behind!”
He seemed to hear the conviction in her voice because he didn’t say another word. He turned to look behind him, then assessed the rubble between them for a second before climbing between the rocks quickly but carefully. Chloe stepped back, looking to her left and right for Clark. She likely had been right to think he couldn’t have made it this far and that, thankfully, meant that he was still closer to the exit. She turned back to Lex as his torso emerged from the rubble. He groaned, pulling himself out through the rocks and finally fell to the ground. Chloe took off in the direction she had come from again and waited at the end of the tunnel for him. “Come on, we have to find Clark,” she said.
“I-I can’t walk.”
“What?”
“There’s something—“ Lex panted, lifting himself onto his elbows to look at his own legs. Chloe rushed to his side again and saw the jagged rock sticking out of his right thigh. Blood soaked through his dark pants, staining the ground where he lay. She winced at the site and fell to her knees beside him. “Just get out of here, Chloe—“
“Lex, stop ordering me around,” Chloe muttered, putting her hands to the wound carefully. She didn’t give him another second to think and pulled the rock out with one strong jerk. He screamed, arching his back on the ground as the blood began to flow more freely from his leg. Chloe took off her jacket and twisted it around his leg, securing it the best she could by tying the arms together. “You’re going to have to walk on it.”
Lex’s eyes were wide and red as he looked at his own leg again, but he would be the last person on the planet to back off from a daunting task. Chloe helped him onto his good leg and let him lean against her as they half-hopped, half-stumbled their way down the tunnel. As they turned the corner, she caught sight of the explosive device strapped to a pole beside the wall that she had missed the first time she had come by here. 00:17:58, it read.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“You didn’t happen to memorize the blueprints to this place by any chance, did you?”
“I know my way back to the exit if that’s what you’re asking,” Lex grunted. His leg was throbbing and he could feel the blood still trickling down his calf, but thinking about that would lead him nowhere right now. He checked his watch and noted that they only had seventeen minutes and some change left. At the rate he was going, he doubted they’d make it to the exit in time.
Chloe wiped the sweat off her brow. “Okay, I’ll help you to the exit and look for Clark. Which way do we go?”
He gritted his jaw even as they took a tunnel to their right. “Chloe, go find Clark,” he said, trying to put all of the Luthor authority and weight to his voice. “I’ll make my way back to the exit.”
“But then I wouldn’t know how to make my way back even if I did find him. I forgot how I came in, Lex,” she admitted, sounding less than pleased with herself, “and I can’t take you with me to search for Clark because—no offense—you’re slow. So the best option is for us to find the exit and for me to go back and search for him.”
It killed him to know that she was right. He wasn’t so egoistical as to be blind to logic and he had to admit that they had no other option, so he pushed himself to go faster. Even though half his weight was on her, Chloe kept up without complaint. They fell into an uncomfortable silence broken only by their own groans and grunts, and the rumble of the tunnels around them.
Still, the more corners they turned, the more he wanted to break the silence. He had to ask her a question and he hated himself for caring about the answer so much. “Chloe, why did Clark come down here?”
“What do you mean ‘why’? Lionel told us you were stuck down here and that you needed help.”
Lex bit his tongue and stared ahead.
“It was the right thing to do, Lex,” Chloe added after a moment as though catching the drift of his thought. “I told him to just let you rot down here, but he—he’s just—“
“He’s Clark,” Lex finished for her. Good little Clark Kent always came to the rescue, whether the person in danger was a baby in a burning building or the evil billionaire who was out to destroy the world, right?
“What did you expect me to say, Lex?” Chloe asked. “Did you expect me to tell you that he came down here for you? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing the best friend who continuously spied on him and stole the love of his life, not to mention experimenting on people and mainlining every possible shady business in Metropolis?”
“I don’t expect you to say anything, Chloe,” Lex replied sharply. Just like I wouldn’t expect you to understand anything I do.
“Then stop asking stupid questions you already know the answer to,” Chloe muttered. “How much time—oof!”
They both stumbled to the ground as a chunk of rock broke free from the ceiling and came crashing down in the middle of their path. Lex flung one arm over her head and rolled her back from the rubble with his other arm around her. They landed on the ground several feet away, side-by-side and staring wildly at the ceiling. He coughed, feeling his head swim as a result of the slow leak of blood from his system. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Chloe replied, wiping rubble off of a gash on her arm. She winced slightly, then looked down the tunnel again. “We have to hurry before the whole thing caves in on us.”
Lex tightened the knot on Chloe’s jacket around his leg, clenching his jaw against the pain, and rose to his feet once more. “Let’s go.”
00:15:23.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“What were you doing down here anyway?” Chloe asked as they pushed on.
“Building a water purification system.”
Does he actually expect me to believe that? Chloe thought with a roll of her eyes.
“Believe it or not, that’s the truth,” Lex said as though he were reading her thoughts. Then again, he probably knew exactly what people thought of him after a lifetime of lying to them.
“So how did a bunch of explosives end up in these tunnels, Lex? Who’d want to sabotage a water purification system?” She looked at him sideways, not caring to hide the animosity in her voice.
“You shouldn’t have a problem believing this one,” Lex replied with a sarcastic smile. “LuthorCorp has many enemies, Chloe, and they don’t care what they’re targeting as long as it gets to me.”
Chloe had long ago learned that she couldn’t believe anything that came out of Lex’s mouth. Even confessions of crimes were elaborate lies to cover up some bigger transgression. It’s like the Luthors had their own dictionary—a completely different language where nothing could be taken to face-value. Interrogating him now would get her nowhere and this was hardly the time or place for a Lex Luthor talk-down, so she fell silent. Lex needed to save his energy. She could tell that he was already getting faint by the way his breathing became shallower and the practically unbearable amount of weight he was placing on her. She shifted closer to him, trying to bear more of his weight on her hip than on her shoulder, and pushed on.
“I better not get any back problems from this,” she mumbled.
“I’ll pay for your medical bills.”
“No, thank you,” she snapped. “The last thing I want is to be in your debt.”
“It wouldn’t be a debt if you save my life first, Chloe,” Lex replied, the edge disappearing from his voice. “It would be a ‘thank you’.”
“I don’t care, Lex,” she replied dispassionately. “Let me be clear on one thing: I came down here for Clark, not for you. The only reason I’m helping you now is because that’s what Clark would want me to do. If it were up to me, I’d have just left you here.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t?” Chloe scoffed, feeling her blood boil at the surety in Lex’s voice.
“No, you don’t,” Lex replied even as he blinked heavily. “Clark would eventually forgive you if you let me die, Chloe, but the reason you’re helping me is because you would never forgive yourself. The two of you are more alike than you realize—that’s why you’re such good friends.”
Chloe shook her head softly, not falling for his touching words one bit as she knew he expected her to. “Your perceptiveness was never under question, Lex. Your morals were. You’re not getting any sympathy from me just by spouting off a couple of tender words about my friendship with Clark—dammit!”
Yet another wall of rocks blocked their path and there was no way to squeeze through them that she could see. “Is there another way to the exit?” She asked.
Lex shook his head. “Not to this exit. There’s another one down there—“ He nodded towards their right.
Chloe sighed, then froze when she heard something ahead of them. “Clark?!” She screamed, running towards the rubble. She climbed over the rocks that had rolled onto the ground. “Clark!”
“Chloe!” Clark’s voice sounded strained. “Chloe, what are you doing here?”
“I found Lex,” she replied. “Clark, there are explosives everywhere! You have to get out of here!”
“Stay where you are,” Clark’s muffled and panicked voice came back. “I’ll come find you—“
“No, Clark! You have to get out! There’s no way for you to get around to us—is there?” She looked to Lex and he shook his head. “Listen, we’ll find our way out, just please—please—get out of here! Tell the rescue team what’s happening. Send them in to find us!”
“Clark, there’s an exit near Reeves Dam,” Lex said. “It’s the nearest exit we can get to. Send the rescue team there.”
“Chloe—“
“Clark, there’s no time to argue,” Chloe snapped, wishing her voice wasn’t trembling. “We only have nine minutes left before we’re all turned to dust. You have to get back and send in the rescue team.”
There was a brief moment of silence and Chloe could almost see Clark’s struggle. There were meteor rocks everywhere and she knew he was in pain. She suspected he was too weak to even carry his own weight, much less find a way around the rubble to where she was. Even if he did, he would be of no help to them, not on this side. “Clark, please,” Chloe said again, gulping past the tightness in her throat. “I know what I’m doing, trust me!”
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“There’s an escape hatch a little ways down ahead of us,” Lex told Chloe. “Listen, Chloe, I can’t make it—“
“Lex, shut up and just keep walking,” Chloe replied, pushing him forward.
“You have a chance of saving yourself—just take the second tunnel to your left, then an immediate right—“
“Keep walking!” Chloe snapped. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
Lex’s leg had gone completely numb about three tunnels ago and he knew Chloe was struggling to carry his weight by how red her face was and how she struggled to get her words out. He was getting more and more lightheaded with every step. “No one would blame you. In fact, they’d commend you for getting rid of me.”
“Do you think the world would be a better place without you in it, Lex?”
He didn’t say anything; it was a rhetorical question, of course, but he suspected that she had a different answer in mind than what he did. It was true that the entire world—everyone who knew him—seemed to think he was some sort of a villain. A threat to society. Only none of them had an alien inhabit their bodies before, did they? None of them had felt pure evil take over their soul. None of them woke up the next morning, suddenly released from that evil as though by some divine intervention.
He had no memory of the time he had spent, inhabited by Zod, but he would never be able to forget the terror that it filled him with either. That terror is what pushed him to do everything that he had done, whether people approved of it or not. They may all be blind to see the threat that was approaching them. Twice now, Earth had been visited by aliens and both times they had to face destruction like they had never seen before. Were people blind enough to believe that there won’t be a third time? Or were they foolish enough to wait for another divine miracle to save their lives?
“Don’t flatter yourself, Chloe. I’m not trying to seek some sort of penance by sacrificing myself for your sake,” he said. “I’m just trying to be logical. We have seconds before I collapse and there’s no way you’ll be able to carry me all the way up the exit hatch on your own. You can save yourself, though. There’s no point in both of us dying down here.”
Chloe took a deep breath as her grip tightened around his waist. “I’m not leaving you here,” she replied stubbornly.
“Do you need to be a hero so badly that you’re willing to lose your life trying?” Lex asked her, and perhaps his word choice had been harsher than he intended because he suddenly felt Chloe’s nails painfully dig into his arm around her shoulder. That sharp pain seemed to cut through the fog that was building around Lex’s head, but only briefly.
“Some of us do whatever it takes to do the right thing, Lex. That’s what being a hero is all about.”
Lex found himself chuckling—a raspy, strained sound that sounded foreign to his own ears.
“What?”
“I’m just trying to do the right thing, Chloe,” he told her as darkness began to take over his senses. He looked at her, seeing only blurred glimpses of her face as his eyelids drooped shut. “I’m just trying to be the hero.”
Author: Quad
Summary: I really like the episode 'Nemesis' in which Clark and Lex get stuck in the tunnels near Reeves Dam and they're trying to help each other get out. However, I feel like it was too late in the Clark-Lex relationship for that experience to really have an impact on how either of them thought of the other. Lex was too resentful of Clark and Clark had pretty much given up on Lex it seemed. They both got out of the tunnels and went right back to hating each other without ever understanding anything about the other person. It made me kind of sad.
Then I got to thinking: what if Chloe had found Lex in the tunnels instead? I have to admit that I've very recently become more and more interested in a Chloe-Lex relationship 'cuz: A. I think Chloe is awesome and B. I think Lex is also awesome (in his own way) and C. I think there was a lot of potential between them even though I don't mind that the potential was never explored on the show.
So, long story short (but not really that short), I wanted to write an "AU" one-shot of what Nemesis would have been like if Chloe had found Lex instead of Clark. Not surprisingly, my "one shot" doesn't really look like it's going to be a "one shot" anymore because I wanted to stay true to the characters and I didn't see either Chloe or Lex changing significantly in the twenty minutes they had down in the tunnels before the big ka-boom! So I might write more of this, I'm not sure! Still, I wanted to post this first bit anyway. I hope you guys like it!
Note: this really is just one big conversation between the two characters with their own thoughts into the situation. As such, it jumps between POV of the two characters and I tried to clearly demarcate these with "page breaks" so I hope that doesn't get too confusing!
Disclaimer: Typical disclaimers apply: Smallville is not mine, the characters are not mine, the awesomeness is not mind, just the words are.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
Hero - Nemesis-Rewrite
Chloe wasn’t exactly the most rational person in times of panic, and she knew that. She had one big weakness—Clark—and if there was any chance that he would be in danger, she dove head-long into a situation without thinking things through. She liked to justify her actions by believing she was protecting Clark, but how much help could a little, five-foot-five, reporter be to an alien with an arsenal of powers that humans couldn’t even dream of? After all, she could barely throw a punch to save her own life, let alone catch automobiles mid-air or put fires out with a sneeze. She wasn’t much help to Clark out on the field, she knew that, so she had resorted to helping him the best way she knew how: with computers and resources. She left the heavy-lifting—literally—to him.
Most of the time… until she found out that Clark might be in trouble. Then logic goes out the window.
She might have made her stupidest move today, she realized. Even as she ran through the cold, damp tunnel with her heart racing, she knew that she couldn’t leave Clark down here. The moment she had seen the kryptonite dust on the rescue team’s vests, she knew he was in serious trouble. So logic went out the window.
“Clark!” She called, hearing her voice echo through the tunnels. “Clark, where are you?”
She arrived at a T-junction and looked both ways wildly. “Clark! You have to help me find you, dammit—“
Suddenly, an explosion rumbled through the tunnels somewhere deep to the left. She stumbled to her knees as the ground shook, releasing debris from the ceiling. She watched the walls with wide eyes, waiting for them to come crashing around her, but they didn’t… not yet. The image of being buried under the rocks was too vivid in her mind though, making her throat tighten. She wasn’t necessarily claustrophobic, but what human being felt save when the world may collapse around them at any moment?
Stop thinking about that, she told herself firmly. You have to find Clark! “Clark!” She yelled again, taking the path to the left. The fluorescent lights were flickering over her head, throwing the tunnels into eerie shadows. The ground was still trembling slightly, or maybe that was just her bones clacking together in panic. She kept running ahead, following the tremble back to its origin until she found the site of the explosion. A mountain of rubble dotted with green meteor rocks had blocked off the tunnel before her, but surely Clark couldn’t have made it this far given the rest of the tunnels were laced with the same? “Clark!”
She heard someone cough on the other side. “Chloe?”
She froze as she recognized the voice. It wasn’t the one she had been hoping to hear. “Lex, is Clark with you?” She leaned down in front of the rocks, trying to find a hole that she could look through. Lex seemed to have done the same because she soon found herself peering through a sizeable gap at his sweaty, dirty face.
“Why would Clark be here?” Lex asked incredulously. “Chloe, what are you doing here?”
“Clark came down here looking for you and I came down here looking for Clark—“
“Chloe, it doesn’t matter,” Lex cut her off. “You have to get out of here.”
“Listen, Lex, I’m not too thrilled to be down here myself and helping you was the last thing on my to-do list today, so far down that it might not even be on the list actually, but you obviously need help so stop being all stoic—“
“Chloe!” Lex shouted, making her jump. “This place is rigged to blow up in less than twenty minutes! Get out now!”
Chloe’s eyes widened as his words sunk in but it took her only a second to make her decision. “Not without you and Clark,” she replied firmly. “Now, come on, Lex. You can squeeze through here.”
Lex shook his head, gritting his jaw. “Find Clark and get out of here. I can find my own way out—“
“Lex, I swear to God, I hate you so much right now that if you give me any reason to leave you behind, I probably will so stop arguing with me and get the hell out of there. I am not leaving you behind!”
He seemed to hear the conviction in her voice because he didn’t say another word. He turned to look behind him, then assessed the rubble between them for a second before climbing between the rocks quickly but carefully. Chloe stepped back, looking to her left and right for Clark. She likely had been right to think he couldn’t have made it this far and that, thankfully, meant that he was still closer to the exit. She turned back to Lex as his torso emerged from the rubble. He groaned, pulling himself out through the rocks and finally fell to the ground. Chloe took off in the direction she had come from again and waited at the end of the tunnel for him. “Come on, we have to find Clark,” she said.
“I-I can’t walk.”
“What?”
“There’s something—“ Lex panted, lifting himself onto his elbows to look at his own legs. Chloe rushed to his side again and saw the jagged rock sticking out of his right thigh. Blood soaked through his dark pants, staining the ground where he lay. She winced at the site and fell to her knees beside him. “Just get out of here, Chloe—“
“Lex, stop ordering me around,” Chloe muttered, putting her hands to the wound carefully. She didn’t give him another second to think and pulled the rock out with one strong jerk. He screamed, arching his back on the ground as the blood began to flow more freely from his leg. Chloe took off her jacket and twisted it around his leg, securing it the best she could by tying the arms together. “You’re going to have to walk on it.”
Lex’s eyes were wide and red as he looked at his own leg again, but he would be the last person on the planet to back off from a daunting task. Chloe helped him onto his good leg and let him lean against her as they half-hopped, half-stumbled their way down the tunnel. As they turned the corner, she caught sight of the explosive device strapped to a pole beside the wall that she had missed the first time she had come by here. 00:17:58, it read.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“You didn’t happen to memorize the blueprints to this place by any chance, did you?”
“I know my way back to the exit if that’s what you’re asking,” Lex grunted. His leg was throbbing and he could feel the blood still trickling down his calf, but thinking about that would lead him nowhere right now. He checked his watch and noted that they only had seventeen minutes and some change left. At the rate he was going, he doubted they’d make it to the exit in time.
Chloe wiped the sweat off her brow. “Okay, I’ll help you to the exit and look for Clark. Which way do we go?”
He gritted his jaw even as they took a tunnel to their right. “Chloe, go find Clark,” he said, trying to put all of the Luthor authority and weight to his voice. “I’ll make my way back to the exit.”
“But then I wouldn’t know how to make my way back even if I did find him. I forgot how I came in, Lex,” she admitted, sounding less than pleased with herself, “and I can’t take you with me to search for Clark because—no offense—you’re slow. So the best option is for us to find the exit and for me to go back and search for him.”
It killed him to know that she was right. He wasn’t so egoistical as to be blind to logic and he had to admit that they had no other option, so he pushed himself to go faster. Even though half his weight was on her, Chloe kept up without complaint. They fell into an uncomfortable silence broken only by their own groans and grunts, and the rumble of the tunnels around them.
Still, the more corners they turned, the more he wanted to break the silence. He had to ask her a question and he hated himself for caring about the answer so much. “Chloe, why did Clark come down here?”
“What do you mean ‘why’? Lionel told us you were stuck down here and that you needed help.”
Lex bit his tongue and stared ahead.
“It was the right thing to do, Lex,” Chloe added after a moment as though catching the drift of his thought. “I told him to just let you rot down here, but he—he’s just—“
“He’s Clark,” Lex finished for her. Good little Clark Kent always came to the rescue, whether the person in danger was a baby in a burning building or the evil billionaire who was out to destroy the world, right?
“What did you expect me to say, Lex?” Chloe asked. “Did you expect me to tell you that he came down here for you? Because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing the best friend who continuously spied on him and stole the love of his life, not to mention experimenting on people and mainlining every possible shady business in Metropolis?”
“I don’t expect you to say anything, Chloe,” Lex replied sharply. Just like I wouldn’t expect you to understand anything I do.
“Then stop asking stupid questions you already know the answer to,” Chloe muttered. “How much time—oof!”
They both stumbled to the ground as a chunk of rock broke free from the ceiling and came crashing down in the middle of their path. Lex flung one arm over her head and rolled her back from the rubble with his other arm around her. They landed on the ground several feet away, side-by-side and staring wildly at the ceiling. He coughed, feeling his head swim as a result of the slow leak of blood from his system. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Chloe replied, wiping rubble off of a gash on her arm. She winced slightly, then looked down the tunnel again. “We have to hurry before the whole thing caves in on us.”
Lex tightened the knot on Chloe’s jacket around his leg, clenching his jaw against the pain, and rose to his feet once more. “Let’s go.”
00:15:23.
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“What were you doing down here anyway?” Chloe asked as they pushed on.
“Building a water purification system.”
Does he actually expect me to believe that? Chloe thought with a roll of her eyes.
“Believe it or not, that’s the truth,” Lex said as though he were reading her thoughts. Then again, he probably knew exactly what people thought of him after a lifetime of lying to them.
“So how did a bunch of explosives end up in these tunnels, Lex? Who’d want to sabotage a water purification system?” She looked at him sideways, not caring to hide the animosity in her voice.
“You shouldn’t have a problem believing this one,” Lex replied with a sarcastic smile. “LuthorCorp has many enemies, Chloe, and they don’t care what they’re targeting as long as it gets to me.”
Chloe had long ago learned that she couldn’t believe anything that came out of Lex’s mouth. Even confessions of crimes were elaborate lies to cover up some bigger transgression. It’s like the Luthors had their own dictionary—a completely different language where nothing could be taken to face-value. Interrogating him now would get her nowhere and this was hardly the time or place for a Lex Luthor talk-down, so she fell silent. Lex needed to save his energy. She could tell that he was already getting faint by the way his breathing became shallower and the practically unbearable amount of weight he was placing on her. She shifted closer to him, trying to bear more of his weight on her hip than on her shoulder, and pushed on.
“I better not get any back problems from this,” she mumbled.
“I’ll pay for your medical bills.”
“No, thank you,” she snapped. “The last thing I want is to be in your debt.”
“It wouldn’t be a debt if you save my life first, Chloe,” Lex replied, the edge disappearing from his voice. “It would be a ‘thank you’.”
“I don’t care, Lex,” she replied dispassionately. “Let me be clear on one thing: I came down here for Clark, not for you. The only reason I’m helping you now is because that’s what Clark would want me to do. If it were up to me, I’d have just left you here.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t?” Chloe scoffed, feeling her blood boil at the surety in Lex’s voice.
“No, you don’t,” Lex replied even as he blinked heavily. “Clark would eventually forgive you if you let me die, Chloe, but the reason you’re helping me is because you would never forgive yourself. The two of you are more alike than you realize—that’s why you’re such good friends.”
Chloe shook her head softly, not falling for his touching words one bit as she knew he expected her to. “Your perceptiveness was never under question, Lex. Your morals were. You’re not getting any sympathy from me just by spouting off a couple of tender words about my friendship with Clark—dammit!”
Yet another wall of rocks blocked their path and there was no way to squeeze through them that she could see. “Is there another way to the exit?” She asked.
Lex shook his head. “Not to this exit. There’s another one down there—“ He nodded towards their right.
Chloe sighed, then froze when she heard something ahead of them. “Clark?!” She screamed, running towards the rubble. She climbed over the rocks that had rolled onto the ground. “Clark!”
“Chloe!” Clark’s voice sounded strained. “Chloe, what are you doing here?”
“I found Lex,” she replied. “Clark, there are explosives everywhere! You have to get out of here!”
“Stay where you are,” Clark’s muffled and panicked voice came back. “I’ll come find you—“
“No, Clark! You have to get out! There’s no way for you to get around to us—is there?” She looked to Lex and he shook his head. “Listen, we’ll find our way out, just please—please—get out of here! Tell the rescue team what’s happening. Send them in to find us!”
“Clark, there’s an exit near Reeves Dam,” Lex said. “It’s the nearest exit we can get to. Send the rescue team there.”
“Chloe—“
“Clark, there’s no time to argue,” Chloe snapped, wishing her voice wasn’t trembling. “We only have nine minutes left before we’re all turned to dust. You have to get back and send in the rescue team.”
There was a brief moment of silence and Chloe could almost see Clark’s struggle. There were meteor rocks everywhere and she knew he was in pain. She suspected he was too weak to even carry his own weight, much less find a way around the rubble to where she was. Even if he did, he would be of no help to them, not on this side. “Clark, please,” Chloe said again, gulping past the tightness in her throat. “I know what I’m doing, trust me!”
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _______________________
“There’s an escape hatch a little ways down ahead of us,” Lex told Chloe. “Listen, Chloe, I can’t make it—“
“Lex, shut up and just keep walking,” Chloe replied, pushing him forward.
“You have a chance of saving yourself—just take the second tunnel to your left, then an immediate right—“
“Keep walking!” Chloe snapped. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
Lex’s leg had gone completely numb about three tunnels ago and he knew Chloe was struggling to carry his weight by how red her face was and how she struggled to get her words out. He was getting more and more lightheaded with every step. “No one would blame you. In fact, they’d commend you for getting rid of me.”
“Do you think the world would be a better place without you in it, Lex?”
He didn’t say anything; it was a rhetorical question, of course, but he suspected that she had a different answer in mind than what he did. It was true that the entire world—everyone who knew him—seemed to think he was some sort of a villain. A threat to society. Only none of them had an alien inhabit their bodies before, did they? None of them had felt pure evil take over their soul. None of them woke up the next morning, suddenly released from that evil as though by some divine intervention.
He had no memory of the time he had spent, inhabited by Zod, but he would never be able to forget the terror that it filled him with either. That terror is what pushed him to do everything that he had done, whether people approved of it or not. They may all be blind to see the threat that was approaching them. Twice now, Earth had been visited by aliens and both times they had to face destruction like they had never seen before. Were people blind enough to believe that there won’t be a third time? Or were they foolish enough to wait for another divine miracle to save their lives?
“Don’t flatter yourself, Chloe. I’m not trying to seek some sort of penance by sacrificing myself for your sake,” he said. “I’m just trying to be logical. We have seconds before I collapse and there’s no way you’ll be able to carry me all the way up the exit hatch on your own. You can save yourself, though. There’s no point in both of us dying down here.”
Chloe took a deep breath as her grip tightened around his waist. “I’m not leaving you here,” she replied stubbornly.
“Do you need to be a hero so badly that you’re willing to lose your life trying?” Lex asked her, and perhaps his word choice had been harsher than he intended because he suddenly felt Chloe’s nails painfully dig into his arm around her shoulder. That sharp pain seemed to cut through the fog that was building around Lex’s head, but only briefly.
“Some of us do whatever it takes to do the right thing, Lex. That’s what being a hero is all about.”
Lex found himself chuckling—a raspy, strained sound that sounded foreign to his own ears.
“What?”
“I’m just trying to do the right thing, Chloe,” he told her as darkness began to take over his senses. He looked at her, seeing only blurred glimpses of her face as his eyelids drooped shut. “I’m just trying to be the hero.”
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