Thirty One

This absolutely terrific cover was made by frazzles. Thank you!!

Disclaimer - DC and WB own them, yadda yadda.

Hmm. AU. Future fic. PG-13 probably. Angst baby! CLex, naturally. Many many thanks to my smoochie for kicking ass *smooooch*.

Feedback would be loooooved. *yawns* I'm going to bed now.

It happens slowly, the same way it happened for everyone else. The same way it's been happening for years.

There's no agonised screaming, no blood, Lex watches as she simply slips away. He still doesn't know her name - she had no ID when he found her, and she's never been strong enough to produce more than confused grunts - but she's the only human contact he's had for some time.

She's a teenager, he thinks, though she looks much older, and had she never been ill she might have been attractive. But she's younger than he is and has probably been ill her entire life.

He sits with her, reads to her, talks about his life Before and After. He's missed the sound of a voice, even his own.

And she shouldn't be alone. Not through this.

He wakes one afternoon, a book clutched to his chest, and knows instantly that she's dead. It's a feeling he's become accustomed to.

He tries her television, but just like all the televisions he's turned on there's no reception. He read and heard all of the international reports before the communications network was lost, and this is another part of the confirmation. The world is dead.

The world is silent.

The day after the last person he knows dies, Lex leaves Metropolis. There's really only one place to go; the place where his life - everyone's life - changed.

He encounters no one as he leaves the city. There's no traffic. Very occasionally there's a vehicle at the side of the road, but that's all he sees. The deaths were never sudden; they knew for a long time they were dying, and most wouldn't have even had the energy to make a panicked drive somewhere, *anywhere*.

Not that anywhere on Earth would have been far enough away.

He travels, at least, in relative comfort. Money was important at the end - in some ways it was more important than ever, which he thinks should have surprised him - so he still has a nice car. It's nothing compared to what his father used to drive when Lex was a child, but a lot of things were different when Lex was a child.

As he expected the freeways are the same as the city - he sees no other drivers. He's the only one on the roads. The radio stations don't work anymore (and they hadn't been particularly cheery before they stopped broadcasting), so he puts a disc into the car's CD player and breaks the speed limit all the way to Smallville.

He tries not to wish that someone would pull him over.

Smallville is much the same as Metropolis, although the decay is slightly different. There's so much that's *green* and all of it is overgrown, and as he drives he sees yellows, reds, browns. So different from the city.

And then he sees a field that isn't overgrown. With cattle that haven't escaped or been set free feeding happily.

He sees a yellow house surrounded by a white picket fence and if it gets any more perfect he may have to drive his car off the road just to prove that he isn't dreaming.

Lex has only just reached the driveway when he sees someone on the front porch - a man - who then jogs down the steps that lead to the front yard. A few yards later Lex is stopping the car, his wheels still spitting gravel as he opens the door and steps out.

The man is out of the driveway now, his expression quite possibly matching Lex's. He has to be the most attractive person Lex has ever seen, but Lex isn't sure if that's actually true or if he just can't remember the last time he saw anyone who wasn't sick. This man...is *healthy*. It all but radiates from his body (plaid, jeans, boots).

They stare at each other for a while, keeping a wary space between them.

"I never get sick." Lex says by way of introduction. "Ever."

The man nods slowly, frowning. "Me neither."

As he finds out soon after, the man's name is Clark.

He's not specifically asked to, but Lex starts living with him. The first night, the first week had just been good manners - somehow this guy still held onto them - but as two weeks, then a month passes Clark simply stops saying "You're welcome to stay tonight."

They talk only infrequently but Lex finds ways to spend his time; investigating the local area on foot, studying the larger impact sites. There's still a lot of equipment left behind by the scientists but he knows he wouldn't be able to find anything they couldn't. Plus...

A cure would be pointless, now.

He helps around the farm when Clark lets him, but Clark seems very territorial about it. Almost secretive. Lex soon knows why, when he sees Clark accidentally put his hand on a blade in the barn that would have wounded anyone else. It's not too much of a surprise. He knows he only survived because he's different; it stands to reason the same would be true of Clark.

"Why did you come here?" Clark asks one evening, as they stand in the barn next to the telescope, looking out at the stars.

Lex shrugs. "This is where everything changed. For me. For the world." Smallville and the meteors had been identified as the cause a few years ago. There'd been talk of isolation and incineration, but by then it'd been far, far too late.

Still, people avoided it like the plague, which Lex had always found nicely ironic because the 'plague' followed them wherever they went. Some kind of microbe from an alien planet and they thought they could outrun it.

Clark looks away, up at the sky with such intensity that Lex imagines Clark can look all the way up there with the naked eye. Maybe he can.

"I glad you're here." Clark says. "Even if I'm not glad of the circumstances surrounding the reason why."

It's the first night they sleep together.

Clark stops hiding what he can do, and Lex discovers it's somewhat gratifying watching Clark blur around the farm, knowing his suspicions have been verified.

Now that he's no longer hiding anything, Clark lets Lex help more. When Lex does help, Clark stops working at superspeed to take him through it, but long after Lex knows what he's doing Clark keeps working at normal speed anyway.

Lex finds that gratifying too.

He passes the graves marked 'Mom' and 'Dad' every day, and one Wednesday - though it might be a Sunday, Lex isn't sure - Clark mentions them for the first time. He says nothing about missing them, or what they were like; just that he remembers his dad teaching him how to drive as they go into town.

They do that sometimes, go into town. Though they're able to grow their own food on the farm (and thank *God* - fresh food had been a luxury even for Lex these last few years), he still thinks there are things that could come in useful. Clark hesitates at first, saying it feels like stealing.

Lex reminds him that everyone is dead.

"Clark," Lex asks one day as Clark is cooking lunch with his eyes, "what is it that makes you different? Was it the meteors?"

Clark stops cooking. Hunches his back. Grasps onto the edge of the counter so tightly that it starts to crack. "In a way."

Clark is floating when Lex wakes up. It's the first time Lex has seen it happen and it does actually make him raise his eyebrows. Making sure he's not laying directly beneath him, Lex speaks.

"Clark? Clark!"

His eyes snap open, he looks across at Lex, and then falls facedown onto the bed in shock.

The bed creaks, but holds, and now Lex realises what the reinforcements under the bed are actually for. Turning on his side, he studies the naked body next to him. "Clark?"

Clark doesn't look at him, keeping his head turned away, but Lex thinks his body might be shaking.

"Lex," his voice whispers eventually, "there's something I have to show you."

He's taken to the storm cellar. Lex has never been there before, it'd always been padlocked and he hadn't been particular interested in what Clark kept in a musty cellar.

As he stares at the spaceship, Lex knows he will never underestimate Clark again.

"I came down with the meteor shower," Clark says, still whispering, still naked, almost curled up into the corner of the room despite the fact he's still standing, "I think I...I think I was the last of my people. That they were trying to save me. My planet was destroyed or blew up and...I came down with the meteor shower."

Next to the ship, touching its unfamiliar surface, Lex doesn't think about Clark being an alien, or another race of beings on another planet, or even about how technologically advanced they must have been.

"You destroyed the world," he says simply, with something that might be awe.

"I know." And Clark is crying, *crying*, muttering apologies to the billions of people who will never hear them and it takes Lex the rest of the night to calm him down.

"It's okay," Lex says softly after he's coerced Clark into bed and pulled him into his arms.

"I killed everyone."

"It wasn't you." Lex argues. "And it wasn't everyone. The day you came down, I was caught in the meteor shower. I've never been sick a single day since. The very thing that killed everyone else made me immune." He pauses, rubbing a hand reassuringly over Clark's back. "Do you believe in destiny, Clark?" There's no response, but Lex isn't really expecting one. He's not sure he'll ever get one again. "I always wanted to rule the world before I was thirty."

He's only a year late.

It'll do.

~FINIS