Moonage Daydream

Moonage Daydream
Chapter One:


"Are you here for masturbation?"
"Excuse me?" Lana Lang snapped as her eyes widened in indignation.
"Oh, sorry," the sanitarium worker seemed to shrink deep within himself as he realized his mistake, "new therapy program, Dr. Hans Bergle's intensive masturbation sessions," he explained. "Down Room 229, Ward E," he continued, gesturing in the appropriate direction. "We get a lot of people for that, lately. You just had 'the look,' about you, you know."
Lana had, of course, never been either so offended in her life nor quite so specifically offended; she was fairly tempted to ask the technician what, exactly, this "look" she had was, but she quickly pushed such concerns aside. "Look," she said, biting back venom, "I'm here to see a friend of mine. I called ahead, my name is Lana Lang..."
At that the worker's face flashed with recognition. "Ohhhhh... you want Room 138! Down that way." He said, pointing in the opposite direction.
Lana thanked the man and proceeded towards the indicated room. She was almost out of earshot when she heard him call back to her, "But I'll tell you now, masturbation won't help those two!"

Of course Lana knew what the technician had been getting at before she opened the door and found them, even his sense of normality, warped as it had been from years of service in this and other mental institutions, could still appreciate someone being just a little off, and what Lana found in Room 138 was no disappointment.
Clark Kent and Lex Luthor sat at opposite ends of square institutional card table, their mutual silence just another white coat of sterility on the blank walls, both young men completely motionless. Clark had the look of clean-cut certainty and single-minded drive on his face previously reserved for Cold War radioactive lizard movies and Depression-era comic book heroes, he stared into Lex's eyes as if trying to read his aura; the whole picture might have had the flavor of a massive staring contest had not Lex's glazed eyes been unfocussed on nothing in particular.
"Clark," Lana said, carefully approaching Clark but not interrupting his field of vision, having made that mistake just once before. "It's me. It's Lana."
"Lana, I'm think I'm on the verge of a breakthrough," Clark said without, somehow, moving his jaw or anything else.
"Of course you are, Clark," Lana managed in her most reassuring tone, "but you're parents and I want you to come home." Now she let her concern show through, "If only for a little while."
Again, Clark did not even flinch. "I was just home."
Lana sighed and said "Clark, that was five days ago."
No response.
"Clark," she was pleading with him now, "you need to take a step away from this for a few days. Maybe even weeks. Get a fresh perspective on all this."
His jaw seemed carved out of granite.
"Clark," Lana placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, "it's been two years now."
That much Clark had not, could not have, lost track of. It had been two years since Lex had his psychic break, two years since he uttered his last words to Clark or anyone and, given the nature of those words, Clark hardly found any consolation in being the one to hear them. In the time since, Clark had been a frequent visitor to Belle Reve, a fact that both Lana and his parents had hoped would somewhat lessen with the inevitable realization that there was simply nothing Clark could do to help his closest friend. However, what had come to pass was quite the reverse. As time went on, Clark became more and more obsessed with Lex's problem and came to blame himself more for it. This was only worsened by the sudden, completely unexplained disappearance of the meteor-freaks that used to occupy Clark's time on a nearly weekly basis; upset as Lana and his parents were by these weekly dangers, they soon came to understand such activities were essential to both Clark's mental and physical well-being, keeping him occupied and testing his powers to their limits; such a distraction would do well now, but both meteor rocks and meteor freaks seemed to have gone extinct overnight and with school behind him, there's was now nothing else to hold Clark's attentions.
"Lana," Clark repeated the phrase that had become his mantra, "the answer is in me. I can feel it."
"I know, Clark," she said, taking him by his arm and forcing him to rise from his seat, "I know."
As Clark stood up, he felt Lana behind, felt her soft curve of her small, perfect breast against his massive back and for a split second snapped back into reality. Lana is the only brief spot of life in this entire room, this entire hospital. She is warm and bright and breathing while Lex and I and even the walls around us have become cold and dull and lifeless. How could I have missed it, he thought, it's all so obvious.
Lana could tell something had changed in Clark, she could sense it. "Clark?" her voice was choked with hope.
"Lana..." he could feel the warm pulsating from her very core, strange red Eden.
"Clark?" She looked deep into his eyes as they burned like splitting atoms.
He was silent for a few seconds, then he said, "Do you think Lex might be the messiah?" and she knew the light had gone out again.
"I... don't know, Clark," she choked, leading him out the door.
Clark nodded, beaming child-like pride for his new theory. "The leper messiah... I think he'd like that."
As the door closed behind them, Lana found herself awash in an involuntary wave of cynicism. "Yes, Clark, I imagine he would..."
Neither of them heard, as the door slammed shut behind them, Lex Luthor, his mind full of jellies and apricots, as he muttered once more his last words to Clark Kent; words Clark had been too frightened to share with anyone else... then once again fell silent.

Far underneath Smallville, in a disused LuthorCorp facility forgotten by all save Lionel Luthor who took the blueprints with him to the grave a strange, mad celebration was well underway. The meteor freaks, danced and swayed around their great erection. For the last sixteen months they had been acting in secret, shunning the light and the human world and its ways, building their own nation amid the rubble. They no longer had names; they had even surrendered language, adopting a series of emotional aggregates and, for some, a sort of limited mental telepathy. For sixteen months they had worked under cover of night, stealing the precious kryptonite from the other world, digging it from the ground or diving for it beneath the waters. Sixteen months and now it was done.
The statue took up most of the lab area, while it was naturally composed largely of the more common green K, there were stripes of red, blue, and white and now they had the most important element; never before seen but they all knew it had to be real: the only miniscule piece of gold kryptonite on the entire planet. As the freak specially chosen for the task began to fuse the gold K into the larger chunk with his heat vision, a mere shadow of the true Krpytonian's, the freaks around him danced themselves into a Bacchanalian frenzy, hearing a music twinkling from the hazy cosmos themselves.