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Full stop
by afrai

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Lex wakes up in a hospital with broken ribs and fingerprint bruises on his chest. The first face he sees is that of an orderly with an acne problem.

It is not a face he remembers once he looks away.

He does not feel revived or refreshed or whatever it is you're supposed to feel when you've been pulled back from the brink of death. He feels like he would like to pee. More importantly, he feels like he would like to see someone important.

He makes this clear to the orderly, in words of one syllable. Lex has a way of saying words of one syllable that makes them peculiarly offensive. It is an art he perfected in England, where he knew people who could make 'hello' sound like the sort of insult you would kill their father for.

When the orderly has scurried away, Lex takes the time to consider the state of himself. He is bruised, battered, bald, but still alive.

Smallville seems to have this effect on him. He thinks it should find a better letter than 'b'.

He finds himself unable to remember much of what preceded his lying prone in a hospital bed with the smell of barely-averted death in his nose. He remembers a bridge and a boy -- again with the 'b's -- but for some reason the images, vivid but blurry, the way things are when you view them out of the window of a speeding Porsche, are jumbled up with the idea of flight.

He examines the idea, but the more he inspects it the less sense it makes, like an oil painting up close. He remembers flying. The memory feels as real as the bridge and the boy, which themselves seem more and more improbable the more he thinks about them.

His head hurts. He wonders how much smarter he'd be if he hadn't chipped away at his brain in one way or another, over the years.

The doctor who finally arrives bows and scrapes like someone talking to a man who could put his entire town out of business. Lex despises him for this in a casual way, but does not show it.

"Tell me what happened," he says. For some reason he thinks of the boy, green-eyed and probably dead. He feels the green of dead eyes like a kick in the chest. He thinks he knows where he's going once he gets out of the hospital.

Roses might be right for the grave of the boy you killed. He would have preferred a truck if he had lived. Lex clutches the bed sheets in his fists, and pretends he's ready to hear the story of how he didn't die.

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