Chapter Text
After everything, after getting out of Cadmus labs, and the mess with Superman and the kryptonite, and what happened with Gramps, Clark brought Kon to live with Clark’s parents in Smallville. Kon didn’t question it—that was just the sort of thing Clark did.
Kon liked Smallville.
Kon liked the Kents and his new, almost-family. He kept his head down, as Clark so clearly wanted him to, he wore the silly glasses and fit himself in comfortably with the average small-town high school student. It wasn’t particularly confining. Smallville folk had plenty of practice not seeing what shouldn’t be seen.
All in all, the transition was easy. Kon liked people and he didn’t dwell on things.
Sometimes things tried to sneak up on him in the night, keeping him wakeful and restless, hardly able to contain himself in his own skin. The household had had a few rough months early on, before they’d settled into tacit understanding. He’d leave a note on his pillow, so the Kents wouldn’t worry, and go out for a flight through the dark, returning for breakfast, chores and school as if he’d never been gone. That was the compromise, a concession to the foundling almost-child they’d accepted into their home.
And if sometimes his night flights took him out of Smallville, if they took him to big cities and dark corners, to clubs packed full of blinding colors and hungry people, well, nobody got hurt and not much out there could hurt Kon.
The Kents might not feel that was part of the unspoken agreement, or then again, they might.
Smallville folk were well versed in all the many shades and layers of secrets and lies.
~~~~~~~~~~
Biologically, Kon had two fathers. Nominally, he was a clone. Practically, he had an odds-and-ends adoptive family, most of which he was not actually related to, and one of which he was very, very related to. Excepting an annoying tendency for people to assume he was Clark version 2.0, Kon considered that he was about as lucky and content as an abomination-of-science could get. Sometimes things came together pretty damn awesome. He wasn't looking to upset the balance.
In hindsight it was probably unavoidable that it was a whim that finally brought him to meet his father.
The other one.
Kon turned a lazy flip in the air, examining Metropolis upside-down on the off chance the view might be more interesting. The ordered turmoil of the busy city below him maintained its distinctly non-criminal countenance, albeit turned on its head.
Typical luck. He actually got an officially-sanctioned, Saturday escape from Smallville, sans giant blue keeper (he was sixteen—was he ever going to shake the babysitter?) and it was going to be completely boring. Not so much as a purse-snatching to foil.
In retrospect, Clark had probably just wanted an excuse to keep Kon from following him. He was totally not buying into any of that sweet talk again. Sure, Clark. I can keep an eye on the big city while you run off to fight aliens or whatever. No problem. Because, you know, I’m sure the Metropolis underworld is just jumping at the opportunity to commit crimes in broad daylight on Superman’s home turf.
Right.
I’m so totally not rescuing any more cats out of trees.
He blew out a dramatic, gusty sigh and angled sideways through the air to loop around the big globe over the Planet. The half empty offices below indicated that even the weekend news would not be particularly exciting. Okay, definitely, definitely, not rescuing any cats today. Bored reporters derived some sort of sadistic glee from embarrassing him, and he could swear they had superpowers for finding precisely those stories that made him look like the world’s lamest superhero. Plus Grandma Martha always clipped all the articles for her scrapbook.
Sorry, kitties. Sometimes a guy just has to draw the line.
He did detour across the city skyline to return an escaped balloon to a howling child, offering a quirked grin to the bag and stroller-laden mother who looked like she was about at the end of her tether. “Need any help?”
The woman dug up a beleaguered smile and indicated the stroller, where a red-faced infant had the look of a baby plotting how best to out-howl his older sibling. “I’ve got the bags. Can you cure teething?”
“Hm. I’m not that super.”
“I guess we’ll manage. Toby, tell Superboy thank you for rescuing your balloon.”
The tear-stained child looked up from chewing the end of the balloon ribbon into his mouth and recited something that might have been the appropriate phrase. Mother and child moved on smiling, despite the rising wails of the infant, so Kon decided to chalk that up as a victory for Team Good.
Unfortunately, balloon-rescuing did very little to either relieve boredom or defend his machismo. As he looped idly through the skies again, he pondered over how many cell phone cameras he’d seen at the last scene, but this had limited entertainment value.
A lone rooftop figure, hoisted high above the surrounding skyscrapers, caught his eye.
Well. That might be interesting.
And Clark did ask Kon to look after Metropolis while he was gone. White collar crime was probably way more prevalent a threat to the city than your ordinary superhero fare of muggings, bank robberies, and supervillains. Wait, did Lex Luthor count as a supervillain?
Sacrificing impulse control on the altar of ennui, Kon tilted to thread through the array of Metropolis buildings toward LexCorp Tower.
He floated into position a yard or two behind Luthor and smirked. His entry line was obvious.
“Boo!”
Luthor didn’t even jump, although the door behind him banged open, discharging a dangerous looking and very armed security guard, gun already aimed and sighted.
Kon held up his hands and tried out his best ‘I’m-too-adorable-to-kill-please-don’t-shoot-me’ smile. The humorless lady behind the gun remained rock steady. “Um. I come in peace?”
Luthor turned from the view, making miniscule adjustments to the fall of his tailored suit jacket as he looked Kon up and down. He wasn't a particularly tall man—average height, which meant Kon had a good few inches on him—but he radiated an assurance of power that seemed to occupy the space around him—the certain knowledge that whatever the business at hand he could crush it under his heel with barely a flex of money and influence. The bald head—practically a Luthor trademark—creased in irritation.
“Superboy.” The man somehow compacted a lifetime of disdain into the title. You could hear the quotation marks. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t have you shot right now for trespassing on private property.”
“Superman would be mad?”
Luthor bared his teeth in something that might possibly, in some species of carnivorous reptile, have been called a smile. “I said a reason I shouldn’t have you shot.”
Kon rotated in the air, attempting to keep both Luthor and the gun-lady under surveillance. The barrel of the gun appeared to be glowing faintly green. “Oh, man, is that kryptonite? I hate kryptonite.”
“You have thirty seconds.”
“I’m not actually on your property! I’m above it!”
“I suspect you will fall downwards.”
“Can I go back to the ‘Superman will be pissed’ one?”
“Ten seconds.”
“Hey, you can’t shoot me! I’m like your son!”
Luthor actually blinked, before returning a cold, narrow gaze. “Infanticide runs in the family.”
“Er. Sorry to hear that?”
The glare hardened, broadcasting I would like to kill you with my mind. “I am running out of patience, Superboy. What—do—you—want?”
“Not to get shot.”
The glare was now broadcasting I will invent a device specifically to enable me to kill you with my mind and then kill you with it.
“I mean, nothing! I don’t want anything! I was just really bored!”
“Bored.”
“Yes?”
“You are harassing me, on private property, in my home, because you are bored.”
Kon decided not to point out that they were technically above the penthouse. He tried another smile. “Got any evil plots for me to foil?”
Wow, those glares could speak whole volumes of painful death and destruction. On the plus side Luthor seemed to be considering a kryptonite bullet far too easy a death for him, so probably Kon wouldn’t get shot.
Confirming the point, Luthor threw up a hand, stalking past Kon and the guardswoman. “Forget it. You’re not worth the paperwork. Fly away and harass someone else. I have work to do.”
Kon frowned. “But it’s Saturday!”
“Amazingly, the wheels of the world do not actually stop turning for arbitrary divisions of time.” Luthor didn’t even glance back as he swept into the stairwell with his bodyguard. Kon floated after him, which made the blonde guard glower and finger her gun, but Luthor waved her off with a, “Don’t tempt me, Mercy.”
“No, seriously. You’re like the richest man alive and you have to work on a Saturday?”
Luthor’s response was clipped and irritated. “First, I am not the richest man alive, and second, if running a multinational corporation did not require hard work everybody would be doing it. And third, you are now both stalking and trespassing.”
“Dude, whatever. That still sucks.” Kon tucked his thumbs into the back of his belt, tipping his head. “Anyway, if you have so much work to do why were you hanging out on a roof?”
Luthor stopped at the base of the stairs, shoulders tightening. After a moment, his posture relaxed, smoothing out. He turned around revealing a face gone completely flat and blank. It made something cold clench up at the base of Kon’s spine in a way the kryptonite and death threats hadn’t. “Forgive me. In the future I will remember that there is no time I may expect to enjoy the peace of my rooftop without unwanted alien invaders dropping by. Thank you for your insightful commentary about my life and character. Good day to you.”
Luthor stepped through the door into the penthouse and pressed a button on the wall as the guard followed him. The door beeped. It swung shut with a very final clank.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mercy paced around her employer’s chair to lock down the windows. Lex had gone from rooftop brooding into manic fervor and was proceeding to the depths of shit-faced drunk. This progression could be easily tracked by the distinct reduction in his vocabulary, an alcohol-induced deficiency Lex compensated for with profanity.
“Fuck. Looks just like him. Fucking clone. Fucking Dad. Fuck.”
Since his meteor-mutant healing was more than sufficient to manage his best attempts at self-induced alcohol poisoning, Mercy’s only responsibility of the moment was securing the penthouse for the evening and seeing that no one further disturbed him. She did not consider listening to drunken tirades and philosophizing to be among her duties to her employer, so she disregarded his diatribe, focusing on a thorough sweep through the rooms for bugs.
Relationships, one of three closely associated things almost guaranteed to trigger her employer’s downward spiral, were not something Mercy was equipped to assist him with. Lionel Luthor, Lex’s father, and another surefire trigger, had passed beyond the influence of the living over two years ago, although his influence on the living lingered like the taste of something rotting. The final of the three Mercy felt more competent to handle, but—until Lex actually let her use deadly force—kryptonite could only provide a temporary solution.
And now, this—clone, with elements of all three. Lionel Luthor's creation from the combined DNA of both his son and Superman, not to mention the reckless employment of a good number of highly illegal and unethical techniques. Uncovered in a covert laboratory barely a year ago, on nearly the anniversary of Lionel's death.
The old bastard couldn't have arranged it much better if he'd been planning it.
Mercy tapped her fingers along the gun at her side.
Lex had gone silent, which was either a good sign or a very bad one, depending, but either way recalled Mercy’s attention. She locked the detector back into its safe, and stood to one side, examining her employer as he stared into the crystal of the decanter and swirled his whiskey. Time ticked by. Lex returned the glass to the side table with a definitive click.
“Sir?”
“I want everything we have on Cadmus labs. I want everything we don’t have on Cadmus labs. And get me a phone. And an aspirin.”
“Yes, sir.” Mercy didn’t smile, even on the inside, but she did let her hand move more than a few inches from her gun for the first time all evening, and her steps felt lighter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So. Lex Luthor. Spinning in the darkening sky, Kon took a moment to contemplate this encounter with the man who had supplied the human (mutant?) portion of his genetics.
Luthor wasn’t a subject he’d given a lot of prior consideration. Okay, yes, he was curious. But the novelty of finding out about the type of people you were cloned from wore off about the time you realized everyone else was going to be plenty obsessed with drawing the comparisons for you. And after more than a year he was still adjusting to the idea that the Kents somehow considered him something like family—trying to figure out what his relationship might be to the two men actually related to him was way too complicated to bother with.
It wasn’t like they were even old enough to be Kon’s father.
Fathers.
And there was a phrase perfectly tailored to sum up exactly why Kon shouldn't have conversations like this with himself. That, and the whole conversation-with-himself aspect.
If Clark was anything concrete it was more like some kind of friendly-competitive-mentoring brother thing, and—
Kon stopped, then, actually halting in midair as if the thought was a brick wall. Because, actually, Clark wasn’t old enough to be Kon’s father. Luthor was… well, Luthor just was. Old enough. Technically. Barely, but still. That was kind of… Well, it wasn’t something that Kon…
It was one of those stupidly simple, every day concepts, that hit Kon like a bullet and ricocheted around until his skull felt full and buzzing.
And he suddenly knew there was no way he could go back to Smallville tonight.
Kon turned his flight around, away from Smallville, back towards Metropolis. The first chance he had, he dropped some change in a payphone and dialed the Kents.
“Hey, Aunt Martha. It's Conner. Is it okay if I stay over at Clark’s tonight? No, it was great. I’m awesome. Yeah, uh-huh. No, I know. If he’s not back tomorrow morning I’ll head straight home. Okay, thanks! I’ll see you in the morning.”
Kon hung up the phone and breezed low into downtown Metropolis.
He didn’t hit the clubs here often, what with the potential problem of running into Clark, but he did have some stuff stashed out of the way. Grab a change of clothes, maybe some money if he’d left any last time, and did he have a fake ID here?
Kon grinned suddenly, huge and carefree and alive. Oh, yeah. That would be just…perfect. It was a good night to be a stranger. It was an appropriate night to be a Luthor.
He tossed his head back and laughed the whole way there, leaving troubled thoughts foundering behind him in the wind.