Johnny had decided that he must have angered the gods, or karma, or something. He only wished that he could work out exactly what he'd done to deserve this sort of punishment, because he'd gladly spend the rest of his life in sackcloth and ashes in penance.

This had been going on for weeks and still Jules showed no signs of letting it go. He'd even commandeered his dad's home office for today's meeting. Johnny noted, with a sinking heart, that there was a white board propped up against the bust of Alexander and a projector linked to Lex's laptop which suggested that he would probably have to endure yet another interminable PowerPoint presentation.

"We've been going about this the wrong way," Jules said, brandishing a packet of whiteboard markers at Johnny in a vaguely threatening manner. "Our previous efforts have lacked cohesion and it's not surprising that we haven't made any progress."

Jules tapped a button on the laptop's keyboard and the projector whirred into life.

"This is our mission statement" - Jules used the whiteboard markers to point out the words projected against the office wall in case Johnny had somehow failed to notice them - "and you'll find an agenda in the documentation that I've left beneath your seat."

Against his better judgement, Johnny looked beneath his seat. Sitting neatly between the back two legs of the chair was a thick purple ring binder with the LexCorp logo embossed on the cover. It had dividers in six different colours.

"You're just like your dad, you know," Johnny said, reluctantly picking up the file. Over the past week, he and Jules had had the misfortune to be on the receiving end of two lectures from Lex about the importance of taking schoolwork seriously. One of them had involved a graph.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Jules said as he advanced on the white board with a gleam in his eyes that was terrible to behold. "My dad's the richest man in America. He must be doing something right."

Johnny's dad had hinted that this actually had more to do with Lex's utter ruthlessness in all his business dealings than with how convincing and thorough his slide shows were, but Johnny bit his tongue. He wasn't going to get side-tracked and drag this whole horrible situation out for longer than was strictly necessary. Johnny was sure there were better things that he could be doing with his Saturday afternoon; even his long-avoided English assignment was starting to seem like the more attractive proposition.

Jules selected a marker from the pack and uncapped it. "So, I thought we'd start with a brainstorming session. I just want you to throw out whatever pops into your head, we can sort out the dross later."

Johnny opened the file and sneaked a peek at the agenda. There were twenty-four points on it.

"How about Mr. Annoying," he suggested, with just the tiniest hint of malice.

Jules scowled, but wrote the name on the whiteboard anyway, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth as he painstakingly formed the letters. He spelt it wrong, but Johnny didn't have the heart to tell him in case he got the whiteboard smashed over his head for his troubles.

"It's easy for you," Jules said as he carefully drew a circle around `Mr. Annoying'. "You don't even have to think about what to call yourself because you're Superman's son. Superboy, although hardly original, is a perfectly valid superhero name. I sort of wish that I was the son, or at least protege, of an established hero. Then I could just stick a `-boy' on the end of their name and have done with it."

"How about J'onn-boy then?" It was cruel, but Johnny couldn't resist.

Jules' scowl darkened yet further. "You know full well that I am in no way related to the Martian Manhunter. Our powers may have a superficial similarity, but that's as far as it goes. I think my dad would have mentioned if I was half-Martian, don't you? Besides, I'd be slightly more green if that were the case."

Nevertheless, Jules did write 'J'onn-boy' on the board, albeit in very small letters.

"Isn't your other father a superhero?" Johnny asked carefully. He wasn't entirely sure how Jules felt about that fact; the other boy never really talked about it. "Couldn't you name yourself after him?"

"Don't you think that might make him a little suspicious?" Jules circled `J'onn-boy' over and over again with sharp flicks of his wrist. "He doesn't know I exist and I'd really rather keep it that way."

Johnny couldn't help himself. Jules knew everything there was to know about him but there was still so much that he didn't know about Jules.

"Aren't you in the least bit curious about him? I mean, I can understand not wanting him to get involved in your life, but aren't there other things that you're interested about? You know you got your powers from him, but what about the other things? The little things like who you inherited your hair from, or the colour of your eyes?"

Jules grinned lopsidedly. "Believe it or not, my dad did at some point in his life have hair. I inherited mine from him and I curse him everyday because of that.

"As for the colour of my eyes? I guess it was from my other father, but I don't much care. It's spectacularly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. My dad doesn't like to think about that time in his life and I don't want to remind him of it. I read everything he's got on file and that's enough for me."

Johnny was curious himself now, and this was far more interesting than trying, and failing, to think up a suitable superhero name for Jules yet again. "Do you even know what his name is? His real name I mean?"

"I think it's Callum. Or Colin. Something like that anyway." Jules shrugged. "As I said, I don't really care. And don't think I don't know what you're trying to do, Jonathan Kent. You won't distract me that easily. Let's get back to work."

Johnny groaned. He had thought that joining the Teen Titans would be fun, not an endless round of safety talks from Lex, training sessions with his dad, and countless sunny afternoons spent cooped up indoors with his best friend, making charts.

He was pretty sure that none of the other teen heroes had to put up with this sort of thing. They probably just spent the entire weekend kicking evil's butt before going back to the Titans' Tower to hang out and play video games and clap each other on the back for a job well done or something.

Really, he had no idea what they did, but he wanted to find out and everyone around him seemed to be dragging their heels. If things carried on as they had been doing lately then, by the time everything had been sorted out, he and Jules wouldn't even qualify for the Teen Titans anymore.

"A lot of superheroes have names based on their powers." Jules wrote `powers' on the whiteboard in uneven capital letters and underlined it. "Like the Flash or Green Lantern. Maybe that would be a good starting point."

Johnny considered this for a time. This really wasn't his forte. He had suggested that Jules ask his dad to come up with a name, but Jules had dismissed the idea, citing the very real possibility that Lex would saddle him with something that was in a dead language, unpronounceable, or both.

"I dunno," Johnny said, feeling as though he was losing the will to live. "Brainiac, maybe?"

Jules slumped across Lex's desk dramatically and put his head in his hands with a moan. "I can't name myself after a super-villain. There would be all sorts of confusion and he might not be too happy with me. I have no desire to get myself an arch-nemesis before my career as a superhero has even begun."

Johnny rolled his eyes at Jules' theatrics. "Why don't I ask my dad to help? He should be good at this sort of thing given that he writes for a living."

"That sounds like a good plan," Jules said, his voice muffled.

"I'll go and ask him now." Johnny made a dash for the door, and freedom, before Jules had chance to say anything more.

In the two months since Johnny had moved into Lex's with his dad and grandma, he'd learnt to be very careful before opening any closed doors in the main part of the house.

It was a lesson that he really wished that he hadn't had to learn, but his dad and Lex didn't seem to know the meaning of restraint yet and he and Jules had walked in on them making out several times in the unlikeliest of locations. On one particularly horrific occasion, neither of them had their shirts on and Jules had threatened to stove his own head in to rid himself of the image. Johnny was glad that his dad seemed happy, and he was sure Jules was happy about his dad as well, he just wished that the two of them wouldn't be quite so demonstrative about it.

He wandered around the house, cautiously peering into rooms, until he noticed music and the faint sound of voices emanating from the kitchen. He made sure that he opened the kitchen door very slowly and as noisily as possible, shouting, `I'm coming in," as he stepped inside. Lex was at work - he'd mentioned something about a forthcoming merger that had gone straight over Johnny's head - but it wasn't unheard of for him to take long lunch breaks and come home for reasons that Johnny didn't like to dwell upon.

Thankfully, the kitchen didn't contain any dreadful scenes of paternal carnality, just his mom and dad drinking coffee at the counter, the radio playing softly in the background.

"Hey, short stuff," his mom said, smiling at him. "I was just going to come and find you after I finished this."

Johnny grimaced at the nickname, but let it slide. He was only a couple of inches shorter than his dad now, and his mom seemed to find it incredibly amusing to tease him about that for no particular reason that he could ascertain.

"What are you doing here?" Johnny asked, reaching around his dad to pour himself a cup of coffee. It was almost cold, but still worth it. Lex bought the best coffee.

"Hey, is that any sort of way to greet your own mother," his mom scolded, but she was grinning as she said it so Johnny didn't feel too bad.

"Sorry, Mom," Johnny hugged her and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek, "it's just that Jules is driving me insane and I'm feeling sort of on edge."

His mom hugged him back tightly, her hand rubbing small circles on his back. It made Johnny a little nervous. His mom wasn't really the hugging type, and it usually meant something was wrong when she clung to him.

"Is everything okay?"

His mom and dad exchanged the briefest of glances, over far too quickly for Johnny to read anything into it.

"Everything's fine, John," his mom said, letting him go. "I just came to ask your dad if he minded me taking you out for dinner tonight, just the two of us. I know that we hadn't arranged anything, but I'd really to talk to you about something."

An uneasy, jittery feeling started up at the bottom of Johnny's stomach. "Okay. That sounds great. It'll be nice to get away from Jules for a little while. And to spend some time with you, of course."

His mom smiled faintly, fiddling with her engagement ring, and his dad shuffled his feet. Johnny narrowed his eyes suspiciously. Whatever his mom wanted to talk to him about, it was obviously big and Johnny didn't really want to wait to hear it. He'd grown sick of secrets over the past few years.

Johnny's dad cleared his throat noisily. "Have you and Jules had a fight or something?"

Jules was right, Johnny and his dad were about as good at subtlety as each other, but Johnny allowed the abrupt change in topic without protest. He'd just have to wait a few hours to find out what his mom wanted to tell him. He could manage that.

"No, it's just that whole name thing again. I said that you'd go and help him."

Johnny felt a little guilty at the look of horror that passed over his dad's face. But only a little. Maybe if he set Jules onto his dad then it would take some of the pressure off him.

"Why don't you go and change?" Johnny's mom asked. "I thought that we could catch a movie or something and then go for a meal. I've made a reservation for six at that little Chinese place you like."

Johnny grinned. Really, that was no hardship at all. It was his dad's turn to cook that night anyway and, although Lex had been trying to teach him how to find his way around a kitchen, that was reason enough to eat out, learning secrets aside.

Johnny's mom was unnaturally quiet as they ate their dinner. She usually had so many things to tell him whenever they saw each other that it was difficult for him to get a chance to say much of anything himself.

Instead, he found himself carrying the conversation for the most part. He told her about his lessons at school, about Jules and his name obsession, and about his dad and Lex's shocking lack of propriety. He'd gotten better at talking to people lately, but his mom seemed very distracted, playing with her napkin and giving only curt replies to anything he asked her. Johnny had to wonder if this was what it had been like for his mom and dad dealing with him for the past few years and gained a fresh sympathy for them. It was tiring work.

He finally lost patience as they waited for their dessert to arrive. "Mom, what's the matter?" he asked. "You said that you wanted to talk to me about something? What is it? You're not sick or anything, are you?"

His mom pushed her spoon across the dark green tablecloth with one finger, her brow furrowed. "No I'm not sick." She took a deep breath as though preparing to dive into deep water. "I'm pregnant."

The uneasy feeling returned and Johnny's chicken chow mein churned uncomfortably in his stomach. "Aren't you kind of old to be having a baby?"

"Thanks for trying to spare my feelings, dear." His mom chuckled. "It's not that unusual for women nowadays to be having their first child at my age. Richard and I have been trying for a while now, but we didn't want to say anything until we were sure that everything was going to be okay. Well, I've had all the tests and it seems like everything's progressing the way it should be. You'll be a big brother in a little less than six months."

His mom smiled at him tentatively but Johnny really couldn't find it within himself to return it. It had been difficult - was still difficult - enough dealing with his dad's relationship with Lex and moving into a new house. He had been relying on his mom to staying the same so that it didn't feel like his whole world was changing at such a rapid pace. For years he'd had his mom, dad and grandma pretty much to himself and he'd liked it that way for the most part. He'd only just come around to the idea that his mom was going to get remarried, a baby brother or sister was just too much to take in.

But his mom seemed happy and Johnny didn't want to upset her. It might be bad for the baby or something.

"That's great, Mom," he said, hoping that he sounded genuine enough to get past his mom's finely-honed bullshit detector.

His mom's smile grew wider and she grabbed his hand across the table, knocking over the soy sauce. "I'm so glad you think so. To tell you the truth, I was worried about how you'd react. I know it's going to be hard since you're used to being an only child, but you'll make a fantastic brother, I know you will."

Obviously, his mom's bullshit detector was faulty. Perhaps it was the hormones. Johnny squeezed her hand and smiled until it felt as if his face might split in two.

The car ride home hadn't helped Johnny reach any sort of decision as to how he felt about his mom's news. It didn't help that, after she told him, she couldn't stop talking, but it was all about babies. Johnny was just about as sick of potential baby names as he was of potential superhero names.

He thought he should be excited, but he just felt kind of empty inside, as though he was still waiting for his real feelings to show up. He also had to wonder how his dad had taken the news. It had been a long time since Johnny had wished that his mom and dad would get back together - and with Lex and Richard in the picture it was more unlikely than ever - but it still seemed strange that his mom was moving on so definitively.

The house was dark when Johnny trudged up the driveway - dragging his feet to make the walk last longer - save for a single light at his dad and Lex's bedroom window, which was a sure sign that his dad wouldn't be available to talk about anything. Johnny wasn't even sure that he wanted to talk to anyone - he hadn't decided what he wanted to say - he just didn't feel like being on his own.

"Hey, Johnny." Jules' voice greeted him from somewhere far above as Johnny stood with his hand pressed against the front door, debating whether to go on inside the house or run until he was going too fast for his mind to be able to keep up.

Johnny looked around in confusion, finally noticing Jules sitting on the third floor balcony, feet dangling over the edge beneath the bottommost rung of the railings.

"Come on up and join me," Jules said, patting the space next to him.

Johnny considered his options for a moment before deciding that talking things through with Jules was perhaps his best one. Although Johnny couldn't promise that he wasn't going to pitch his friend headfirst over the railings if the other boy so much as mentioned anything to do with superheroes.

Jules wagged his finger good-naturedly as Johnny floated up to the balcony. "My dad would go crazy if he saw you doing that. 'No costume, no powers', remember?"

"Well, he's not around to see me, is he," Johnny said as he settled himself next to Jules. "Why are you up here anyway?"

"Our dads had the most enormous fight this evening. First there was the shouting, then there was the sullen and uncomfortable silence at the dinner table, and now I think they've moved on to the noisy behind-closed-doors making up part." Jules shuddered. "I came out here to get out of the way. I had a headache already and they were just making it worse."

Johnny thought that Jules looked paler than usual. He'd been complaining about having headaches for a while but had always shrugged off their seriousness. Lex had taken Jules to see Dr. Mason a couple of times, worried that it might be some delayed effect of his spinal injury, but the doctor hadn't been able to find anything wrong.

"Any idea what it was about?" Johnny didn't think he'd be able to deal with it if the fight had been serious, not on top of what his mom had just told him.

Jules raised one shoulder slightly. "Something about kryptonite and battle armour, I think. I couldn't really follow what was going on."

Johnny relaxed a little. That sounded like Superman stuff and that was usually resolved pretty quickly. It had come as a bit of a shock to Johnny's dad but, despite them all living together and Lex giving his blessing for Jules to join the Teen Titans, Lex still wasn't the world's greatest supporter of superheroes. It had caused a few arguments - most notably an occasion a few weeks before that had resulted in Lex threatening Superman with a kryptonite ray gun from the top of the LexCorp tower - but they didn't tend to last very long. If it had been something personal, Johnny would have been more worried.

"You're unhappy about something," Jules said, nudging Johnny in the ribs with his elbow.

Johnny snorted. "You read my mind, did you?"

"No." Jules elbowed Johnny again, this time with more force. "You know how rude I think that is. I can't believe that you'd suggest such a thing." Jules sounded mortally offended, but it was always hard to tell whether he was being serious or not about such things.

"My mom's pregnant," Johnny said, and it didn't make any more sense now that he'd said it out loud.

"Oh." Jules cocked his head on one side and frowned. "Isn't she kind of old to be having a baby?"

"That's what I thought, but apparently not."

"You want to talk about it?" Jules asked, patting Johnny's knee.

Johnny suddenly realised that he didn't. He knew Jules would be willing to listen, but Johnny felt like he needed some time to get used to the idea and maybe to talk to his dad about it first.

"Not really, but I'll let you know when I do. Did I miss anything else exciting while I was out?"

Jules' smile was triumphant and brightened up his wan face considerably. "Well, you'll be glad to know that I've finally thought of the perfect superhero alias."

Johnny had expected Jules to make more out of the announcement than he did.

Given the countless hours of his life that Johnny had sacrificed to Jules' quest - not to mention the stress and almost unbearable strain on his sanity - he was almost disappointed, despite being relieved that the whole ordeal was finally over. He was expecting some form of presentation at the very least.

Instead, Jules merely said, "I've thought of a superhero name," casually at the table the next morning, between mouthfuls of cereal.

Johnny's dad was still chuckling about the name as he and Johnny washed the breakfast dishes.

Johnny rolled his eyes, suppressing his own laughter so hard that his stomach was aching with it. "Come on, Dad," he pleaded. "It's not that funny."

"Morpheus?" Johnny's dad repeated for what must have been the hundredth time that morning. "I think I actually preferred Brainiac."

"He was the Greek god of dreams," Johnny said, feeling a little affronted on Jules' behalf. None of them had been able to come up with a better name, after all, and Jules seemed to like it. "Lex thought it was a good name. He said it was very apposite."

"Of course Lex likes it. It's the sort of thing that he'd call himself if he were a superhero," Johnny's dad said, smiling fondly. "In fact, I'm surprised he didn't think of it first."

They finished the dishes in silence, broken only by the gentle clink of the plates as Johnny stacked them and the occasional whispered and disbelieving, "Morpheus," from his dad.

After everything was put back into its place, Johnny was looking forward to a day free from any concerns other than kicking Jules' ass at video games and perhaps seeing if they could bug Lex into letting them take one of his Porches out for the afternoon. Or maybe the Lamborghini. Johnny liked the Lamborghini.

His dad seemed to have other ideas, however. "Hey, how did dinner with your mom go last night?" he asked, his voice suddenly serious.

Johnny sighed, sagging against the counter. "It was okay. She told me about the baby."

"How do you feel about that?"

Truthfully, Johnny had been happy not to feel anything about it, to not think about it. "I don't know, Dad," he said. "It's just weird, I guess. I'm not really used to the idea yet."

"If you need to talk about it, I'm always here to listen." Johnny's dad clasped the back of Johnny's neck and squeezed gently. "You know that, right?"

"Yeah, I know," Johnny said, leaning into his dad's hand slightly. Johnny knew that his dad was worried that he was cutting him out deliberately, and Johnny couldn't really blame him for thinking that, not after how he had behaved for the past few years.

His dad smiled, obviously reassured. "Have you got any plans for the rest of the day?" he asked, ruffling Johnny's hair affectionately.

Johnny sighed; he could see his lazy Sunday speeding away from him like the Lamborghini that it seemed he wasn't likely to be driving any time soon. "Nothing I can't do another time."

"There's something I want to show you. Meet me on the roof in five minutes." Johnny's dad eyed him speculatively. "You should probably wear a coat."

Johnny wished that his dad had been a little more specific about what sort of coat to wear. Johnny felt a little foolish standing in the startling white vastness of the Arctic ice wearing a thin jacket that wouldn't even have been suitable for a Metropolis winter. They hadn't seen another living soul for miles, but if they managed to run into some polar bear biologists or something, Johnny was going to be really embarrassed.

Johnny shivered. Although he didn't feel cold, it seemed like the right thing to do as the no-doubt icy wind whipped his hair into his eyes and made his breath rise in white clouds that fogged his glasses. Somehow, not feeling cold in the Artic made Johnny feel even more alien than the fact that he'd just flown there from Metropolis.

"Are we lost, Dad?" Johnny asked, taking his glasses off and wiping them on his T-shirt.

Johnny's dad was floating above Johnny, frowning as he scanned the horizon. "Of course not, I just thought I saw..." He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Come on, we should get moving if we want to get back home in time for lunch."

Johnny replaced his glasses, shifted his weight onto his toes and pushed himself upwards until he drew level with his dad; who grinned at him briefly before speeding away.

Jules had often asked Johnny to explain exactly how he flew, but Johnny couldn't accurately describe it, no more than he could describe exactly how it felt. There was just a sensation of weightlessness, of a tightly coiled power deep within him suddenly released, of the pull of gravity falling away from him, and then he was aloft. Jules was never convinced, trying to parse it in laws of physics that clearly didn't apply.

Johnny just knew that it felt good. That he never felt freer than this: the sky open and bright above him and everything below fading into insignificance. Before he could fly, he used to try and run fast enough to leave his problems behind, but now he floated far above them.

The Fortress was nothing like Johnny had thought it would be. He had always imagined a slightly more frozen version of his dad's fortress at the farm; perhaps an ice cave filled with crappy old furniture and family photographs. If he'd known it was like this, he wouldn't have put up so much of a fight every time his dad had threatened him with a trip to the Arctic as a punishment.

"This is incredible," Johnny said, tipping his head so far back in an effort to see the top of the Fortress that he almost fell over.

Johnny's dad put an arm around Johnny's shoulders and briefly pulled him close. "I'm sorry I never brought you here before, but I was waiting for the right moment."

"And this is it?"

"Honestly, I think it's probably years past the right moment," Johnny's dad said, placing one palm flat against the smooth, glass-like surface of the fortress. "I think if you'd known more about your heritage, what you are, then maybe you wouldn't have been so scared of your powers, but I was always worried that it would be a little overwhelming for you."

Johnny gingerly touched the point of a crystal that jutted out beside his dad's hand. It seemed to move beneath his fingers: a faint, rhythmic pulse reminiscent of a heartbeat. "I don't think that I could ever have been ready for this, Dad."

His dad smiled faintly as he drew back from the wall and a section of it, indistinguishable from the rest, slid aside noiselessly, revealing a set of clear crystal stairs softly lit from beneath.

"Welcome, Kal-El," a voice said as soon as Johnny and his dad stepped inside. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once, human and yet not quite.

"Hi," Johnny's dad said casually, as if he were talking to an old friend. "AI, this is my son, Johnny."

"Hi," Johnny waved his hand and immediately felt really stupid as he didn't even know if it could see him. He couldn't see any cameras, but as he didn't have any idea what a Kryptonian camera might look like, he couldn't be sure.

"Welcome, Jon-El," the voice intoned expressionlessly.

Johnny frowned. "No, my name's Johnny," he said, pronouncing the name slowly and carefully in case the AI had misheard it.

"Welcome, Jon-El," the voice repeated. If Johnny hadn't known that the voice came from a computer, he would have said that it sounded a little petulant.

Johnny was about to protest when his dad's hand curled around his wrist, urging him, not very subtly, to start moving. "You can argue about it later. If you start now, we'll never get to see everything that I want to show you."

Johnny bit back his complaints and allowed his dad to drag him up the stairs.

Whatever it was that the AI used to see, Johnny was very aware of it watching him as he and his dad toured the Fortress. Every time that Johnny touched something that his dad pointed out to him, or even looked at it for too long, the AI would make a low hum and the floor would vibrate slightly. It reminded Johnny of going out to fancy restaurants with his grandma. She'd never actually say anything, but she would purse her lips and make a disapproving noise every time was too rough with the expensive plates or fiddled with the table decorations as they waited for their meal to arrive.

He got the impression that the AI would really rather that he wasn't there at all and was suffering his presence only for his dad's sake. It made Johnny uncomfortable, but his dad seemed so excited about Johnny being there that he couldn't bring himself to mention it.

Besides, the Fortress was amazing. His dad had shown him things there that Johnny hadn't even guessed could ever exist: an entire Kryptonian city shrunk to fit inside a bottle, a portal to another dimension that his dad asked him not to get too close to, and artefacts from distant worlds that looked like props from a particularly unbelievable sci-fi movie.

Being in this place, among these things, Johnny realised that he'd been denying so much more than his powers for the past few years. He was slowly coming to accept that he could do things that normal humans couldn't, but it had never really occurred to him that there was more to being alien than being able to fly or being able to run home from school before the last bell had even finished ringing. There was an entire world that he had to learn about, an entire other culture and history that were as much his as a small farm on the Kansas plains and the towering skyline of Metropolis.

He realised that he wanted to know more about Krypton, about everything that his dad had seen and experienced in his time as Superman, and wished he hadn't tried so hard to ignore them. He could have spent the rest of his life ignoring this part of himself, but it wouldn't have changed what he was.

It made him wonder anew why it was that Jules had no interest in finding out more about his other father. About where his powers came from and what their limits were.

"Jules would love this place," Johnny said, running his hands carefully over a neat array of crystals that his dad had told him contained all of Krypton's recorded history, while the AI hummed its disapproval. "He'd drive himself crazy trying to figure out how it all worked."

His dad coughed, his cheeks flushing with colour. "How would you feel if I brought Lex here?"

"It's your place, Dad." Johnny shrugged. "I guess you can bring anyone you want."

"It's our place, Johnny. If you're not comfortable with it, then I won't let him come. It might stop him trying to break in, though."

Johnny grinned. "We should bring them both, then, although I don't think the AI would like it. It doesn't seem to like me being here either."

"The AI's just... set in its ways and protective of this place. It's used to just having to deal with me, but it'll get used to you eventually."

The AI's hum deepened, as though disagreeing with Johnny's dad's words, but it didn't say anything more.

Johnny quickly looked around the Fortress again, making sure to fix it firmly in his mind so that he could describe it properly to Jules when they got home. Jules was bound to be full of questions and he'd be pissed if Johnny couldn't answer them in excruciating detail.

They seemed to have visited every room, save one whose door was locked and that Johnny's dad had scurried past and said that they could leave until another time when Johnny asked about it. "Are we about ready to go?" he asked.

"There's just one more thing I want to do while we're here," his dad said, looping an arm around Johnny's shoulders. "I want to introduce you to your grandparents."

Johnny had always been a little scared of the thought of his Kryptonian grandparents as a kid. When his dad had told him about being an alien, he'd also told him about how Lara and Jor-El lived on as holograms in the Fortress. He suspected that his dad had meant it to be comforting, but to an eleven-year-old Johnny, it had just sounded as though his grandparents were ghosts. He'd spent almost a year sleeping with a flashlight under his pillow and a baseball bat beside his bed after that revelation.

"I'd like that," Johnny said quietly, suddenly wishing that he was wearing something smarter and that his hair wasn't a tangled mess from all the flying and Arctic winds. He tried to flatten it down with little success.

His dad smiled softly. "I think that they'd like that too. I've told them a lot about you. Although, you have to understand -"

"Kal-El," the AI said stridently, brightly coloured lights blinking across the blank crystal wall in front of Johnny and his dad in time with its words. "There appears to be an incident occurring in Metropolis that requires your immediate attention."

Johnny's dad groaned, rubbing at his eyes as if they pained him. "I'm sorry, son. It looks like you'll have to take a rain check on that plan."

The blinking lights on the wall slowly coalesced until they formed a recognisable picture: Metropolis as seen from the roof of the Daily Planet building. A purple-suited figure was criss-crossing the `screen', leaping from rooftop to rooftop and throwing some sort of grenades from his purple backpack onto the streets below.

Johnny's dad groaned again. "What the hell is he doing back in Metropolis?"

Lex and Jules were already waiting on the roof when Johnny and his dad arrived back home. Lex was talking to someone on his cell phone and he handed Johnny and his dad suit bags containing their costumes as soon as they landed without even pausing in his conversation, and then shooed them away with a brusque flick of his wrist.

Johnny ducked behind a chimney to change; his entire body thrumming with excitement, and his hands trembling so violently that he could barely coordinate his fingers well enough to unzip the suit bag. Fortunately, his costume only consisted of a black T-shirt bearing the crest of the House of El that he wore with his jeans, because he was sure that if had to wear a spandex suit - or, God forbid, a cape - as his dad wanted him to, then Metropolis would have burned down to the ground before he'd struggled into it.

Johnny and Jules had gone out on patrol with Johnny's dad a few times, but they'd never been involved in anything really exciting. They'd rescued a few cats from trees, and nodded solemnly as Superman lectured people about the dangers of jaywalking or speeding, but this would be the first time that they'd gone up against a super-villain. Johnny suspected that his dad had deliberately chosen quiet nights to take them out before.

Johnny folded his jacket carefully and placed his glasses on top of it. His legs were shaking as he walked back to where his dad and Lex were standing, apparently in the midst of a rather heated argument carried out entirely in fierce whispers and abrupt hand gestures.

Jules hurried over to join Johnny as soon as he spotted him, his excitement obvious in the speed and unevenness of his steps. "Where've you been all morning? This guy's been causing trouble for almost an hour, and I think Dad was starting to get worried."

"We've been at the Fortress, but the AI told us what was going on. We got here as quickly as we could." Jules lifted his hand and took a deep breath, so Johnny said, "I'll tell you all about it later," quickly to stop his questions before they started.

Johnny could tell that Jules was disappointed by the slight slump of his shoulders, but it was still strange not to be able to see his friend's expression. Johnny's dad had argued just as hard about the unsuitability of Jules' costume as he had about Johnny's, but Lex had made only a few concessions. The body armour had been reduced to a simple back and chest plate beneath his costume and thick leather slash-proof gloves. The only other change was that Jules' goggles were now the same shade of green as the glasses he had to wear in class rather than the more tell-tale LexCorp purple.

Johnny's dad maintained that the full face mask made Jules appear a little sinister, but Lex was adamant that his son's anonymity was far more important than any potential discomfort the public might feel around him.

"Who is this guy anyway?" Johnny asked. "I don't recognise him."

"He calls himself the Atomizer," Johnny's dad said, striding towards them with his face set in a determined expression that was purely Superman, "and I thought he'd been taken care of."

"He's very difficult to deal with," Lex added as he followed Johnny's dad. "He seems to have no interest in money; in fact he seems to have little motivation for what he does at all. It's very difficult to know what to offer him. I'd heard nothing about him since he was released from prison and so I presumed - erroneously, it appears - that he'd given up this sort of thing of his own accord."

"He's fairly harmless, though," Johnny's dad said. "The grenades he's throwing seem to do little more than emit clouds of smoke and stain people's clothes. I think he just likes the attention more than anything else."

"Nevertheless, you should stop him before he starts seriously pissing people off," Lex said, hugging Jules briefly.

Lex then kissed Johnny's dad, to the usual accompaniment of Jules' exaggerated exclamation of displeasure, before turning towards Johnny. Johnny shifted uncomfortably, trying to avoid Lex's eyes. He liked Lex well enough, but they hadn't quite defined their relationship yet; it was still in a sort of nebulous place where Lex was Johnny's dad's boyfriend and his best friend's dad, but what Johnny and Lex were to each other hadn't quite worked itself out.

Lex apparently decided that whatever they were, a hug was inappropriate, and he simply patted Johnny's back a couple of times. "Take care. Make sure that you keep me updated with what's happening, Jules."

"I will, Dad," Jules promised, as he held his arms out for Johnny's dad to pick him up.

Lex watched them from the edge of the roof as they took off, before disappearing back into the house, no doubt to drink scotch and worry while watching WGBS, as he always did when Superman was away on a mission.

It seemed as though the Atomizer wanted to be caught. He was standing on top of the LexCorp tower, watching the skies, and he even waved as they flew over.

"Do the bad guys usually do that?" Jules asked. "I'm disappointed. I thought there was a lot more chasing and fighting involved. I might have to rethink this whole superhero thing."

"No," Johnny's dad said as he banked toward LexCorp, "it's never normally this easy, even with a guy like the Atomizer."

"Do you think it's a trap, Dad?" Johnny asked.

The Atomizer didn't look like he could put up much of a fight anyway. The way that his suit hung in folds beneath his stick-like arms was a salutary lesson on why skinny guys shouldn't wear spandex, and Johnny made a mental note to draw his dad's attention to that at some point.

"I don't think the Atomizer can plan far enough in advance to set up a trap," Johnny's dad said, drifting slowly down towards the rooftop, "but you boys had better stay alert anyway."

The Atomizer rushed towards them as they landed. "Welcome Superman" - he looked at Johnny and Jules suspiciously, eyes glittering beneath his ridiculous conical hat - "and friends. How kind of you to join me."

Johnny's dad set Jules down carefully and then folded his arms across his chest. He appeared to grow several inches, towering above the Atomizer. "This isn't a social visit, Atomizer. What you're doing has to stop."

The Atomizer giggled and hopped from foot to foot excitedly. "I've not even started yet, Superman, old friend. You wouldn't believe what I've learned since the last time I saw you."

"That's enough," Johnny's dad said, grabbing the Atomizer's arms and holding him still. "I'm going to hand you over to the police, although your last visit to jail doesn't seem to have taught you anything."

"Oh, it taught me a lot." The Atomiser grinned madly up at Superman, before throwing back his head and screaming, "Goliath!"

Johnny's dad looked puzzled, his eyes shifting from the Atomizer's upturned face, to Johnny, and then finally to Jules. He raised his eyebrows quizzically.

"Superman, I think you should grab the Atomizer and we should get out of here," Jules said, taking a couple of shaky steps backwards toward the edge of the roof.

"What is it, erm, Morpheus?" Johnny's dad asked. He sounded a little nervous himself, and his grip on the Atomizer tightened.

"I don't know what this `Goliath' is, but it's big. Really big."

"We should..." Johnny's dad's voice trailed into silence and his eyes became impossibly huge as he looked at something beyond Johnny's left shoulder. He shook his head, obviously gathering his composure, and when he spoke again his voice was soft but commanding. "We should run, boys. I'll get you all to safety, then I'll come back to fight this thing. It looks far too dangerous for you to be tackling on your first time out."

A shadow moved across the rooftop, plunging it into a darkness almost as absolute as if night had suddenly fallen at midday. The faint sounds of screaming and car tyres screeching floated up from the streets far below.

Johnny would have expected Jules to argue, but he allowed Johnny's dad to pick him up without complaint. Johnny's dad circled Jules' waist with one arm, the now maniacally laughing Atomiser's with the other, and shot into the sky.

"Follow me, Johnny," he shouted down. "Don't even look try and look at that thing, just follow me."

Johnny meant to obey his dad, and he bent his legs in preparation for taking off, but the thing behind him made a horrible roaring noise, the sort of noise Johnny expected a dragon might make.

He turned his head.

It was enormous; easily as big as the T-Rex skeleton that they had at the Natural History museum. An enormous metallic creature with wings so wide that they blotted out the sun.

It moved towards Johnny almost silently, its long, whip-like tail scything through the air behind it, curling over its head like a scorpion's did when it got ready to strike.

Johnny couldn't move. His legs felt simultaneously too weak to be keeping him upright and too heavy to lift. He could only stare in mute horror as the creature's mouth opened and it roared again, the segmented end of its tail splitting apart to reveal something that shone a sickly shade of green that Johnny had seen only once before.

And then Johnny couldn't stop himself moving. He staggered backwards blindly in an effort to get away from the kryptonite, whose deadly radiation tore at his skin like claws, that made his stomach feel as if it were being eaten away from the inside, and his head pound so much that he couldn't see.

He didn't realise that he'd reached the low wall that encircled the roof until he was crashing through it, aware of nothing more than his dad crying out his name in anguish, of Jules screaming in his mind, and the rush of cold air around his body as he fell.

He only knew that he'd reached the street when lumps of asphalt and fragments of paving stones flew up around him. If the impact had hurt him, he couldn't tell that pain apart from the pain of the kryptonite still ravaging his body.

He was dimly aware of people shouting and someone touching his leg and asking him if he was okay, but the last clear memory he had before he gratefully let the comfortable darkness behind his eyes claim him was of the scream of tortured metal from high above him and oil falling on to his face like rain.

As the darkness receded, Johnny gradually became aware of his surroundings. He could smell coffee and hear the gentle susurrus of a conversation carried out in hushed tones, although he couldn't make out a single word of it. There was a soft mattress beneath him where he expected to feel rubble.

And he was hot. It was an unusual sensation and an uncomfortable one: his skin felt prickly and several sizes too small. He tried to throw off the blankets covering him, but his arms and legs seemed unwilling to obey him and simply twitched uselessly.

"You should be resting," Jules said from somewhere nearby.

Johnny opened his eyes slowly and then blinked several times until his hazy vision cleared enough to reveal Jules sitting on a chair that had been pulled close to the bed.

Although Jules had removed his mask, he was still wearing the rest of his costume, which was stained darkly across the chest and missing one of its sleeves. His eyes were bright in his too-pale face, as if he'd been crying or was just about to start.

Johnny wanted to ask Jules whether he was okay and if they were safe, but his throat was too dry to form the words and all that emerged was a thin, wheezing moan.

"Don't try to speak," Jules said, placing his hand gently on Johnny's forehead. "You're home and you're safe. I'm okay, your dad's okay, and we destroyed Goliath. You don't need to worry about anything but getting better."

Jules' hand was wonderfully cool against Johnny's heated skin and Johnny pushed up against it weakly. Jules let out a shaky breath and started to brush Johnny's hair away from his face with trembling fingers.

"Your dad's still dealing with the Atomizer and my dad's trying to organise people to clear up the mess that Goliath made," Jules' voice was as unsteady as his hand, "and the mess that you made when you... God, Johnny, I thought you were dead. I didn't think anyone could survive a fall like that, not even you."

Johnny didn't want to think about the robot, kryptonite, or falling. Instead he let himself drift, and the gentle rise and fall of Jules' voice and the soothing rhythm of his touch slowly lulled him toward sleep.

When Johnny woke again, the curtains were drawn and the only light in the room came from the small lamp on his desk. His body felt lax and heavy, but not painful. There was a dull ache in his muscles that felt like the memory of pain, but nothing more.

Someone was holding his hand and he thought for a moment that it must be Jules, but a quick glance told him that it was his mom. She was sitting on the chair that Jules had been using earlier, but she'd pulled even closer to the bed than Jules had left it. Johnny tried to say something to her, but he couldn't even make the pathetic croaking sound that he'd managed earlier. His mouth and throat felt tight and scorched as though he'd been drinking acid.

Someone had put a glass of water on his bedside table and Johnny thought that it might just be the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, but he couldn't move his arm enough to reach for it himself. He couldn't even find the energy to squeeze his mom's hand to attract her attention and get her to pick the glass up for him.

Johnny thought that he might have been able to communicate with his mom using eye movements - his eyes were the only part of him that felt like they were still under his control - but she wasn't looking at him. Her attention was fixed on the door, her whole body taut and straining towards it.

She only relaxed when it opened, slumping back in the chair with her free hand curving over her stomach. Her grip on Johnny's hand tightened for a moment before relaxing and slipping away.

"How is he?" Johnny's dad asked as he shuffled into the room almost apologetically, carrying a chair.

Johnny was glad to hear his dad's voice. The last time this happened, he hadn't exactly been happy to see his dad when he woke up, but things had been different then. His dad had a way of making things seem safer and calmer just by being there. Johnny wasn't sure if it was a Superman thing or a Clark Kent thing.

Johnny hoped that his dad's presence meant that everything was normal in Metropolis again. Or at least as normal as the city ever got.

"He's still sleeping." His mom's voice was sharp, making the simple statement sound like an accusation.

Johnny found that, suddenly, he didn't want to let his parents know that he was awake. He might want the water, but the temptation to stay mute and eavesdrop was too great. His mom and dad were always polite, even friendly, to each other while he was around, but he'd always wondered how they acted when they were alone.

It felt a little deceitful, especially when they were probably worried about his health, but habits years in the making were difficult to break. Johnny let his eyelids droop until he was sure that his eyes would look closed to casual inspection and held himself as still as possible.

Johnny's dad placed his chair next to the one Johnny's mom was using and made himself comfortable, shifting his weight restlessly, before he spoke again. "I don't understand why kryptonite does this to him. It's never affected me this badly, even at his age."

"I think that might be because you built up a small level of immunity to it," Lex said as entered the bedroom. "You grew up in Smallville, drinking water contaminated with kryptonite, eating food grown in soil littered with it."

Lex stationed himself behind Johnny's dad's chair. He placed one hand on Johnny's dad's shoulder and extended the other towards Johnny's mom, but he didn't try to touch her. Johnny's mom gave Lex a dark look that suggested she'd bite his arm off if he even tried.

"Are you suggesting he spends more time around kryptonite?" Johnny's mom sounded blackly amused at the suggestion. "It's nearly killed him twice now."

Lex's dropped his hand and slipped it into the pocket of his pants. "Not at all, it's simply a hypothesis. One of many possible explanations."

Lex sounded a little hurt at Johnny's mom's words, maybe a little angry too, and his eyes narrowed fractionally. Johnny's mom glared at Lex and Johnny was worried that they'd start an argument, and Johnny thought that an argument between his mom and Lex had the possibility to turn nasty pretty quickly. Johnny didn't know all the details, but he knew that his mom and Lex had almost as chequered a history as Lex and Johnny's dad did. Johnny's mom professed to like Lex, but she had a quick temper and could hold a grudge like no one else Johnny knew.

Johnny's mom held Lex's gaze for a long time and Johnny braced himself for the explosion as best he could, but it never came. Instead, his mom simply shook her head and sighed heavily. "Maybe it's too dangerous for him to be doing this superhero thing. He's only a kid, and I can't stand the thought of this ever happening to him again."

"We've tried to talk to the both of them," Johnny's dad said. He sounded as relieved as Johnny felt that the direction of the conversation had changed. "They won't listen and we can hardly force them to stop doing it. Look what happened the last time they tried to do things on their own."

"I know you're right," Johnny's mom said quietly, "but that doesn't stop me worrying."

"Nor me," Johnny's dad said, and Lex nodded his agreement.

No one spoke for a little while and Johnny found it hard to keep his eyes open, his eyelids sagging as if tiny lead weights were tied to the ends of his eyelashes. He wished that there was something he could say to reassure them that he and Jules would be okay, but he didn't think that there was, even if his voice had been working. He was just as scared himself - he'd never even imagined, before he experienced it the first time, that pain like the kryptonite caused him even existed - but he knew that he needed to help people with his powers.

He and Jules had talked about it late into the night just before their trip to Gotham, Jules' thoughts in Johnny's head as they often had been back when Johnny's dad hadn't wanted the two of them to be friends. Johnny had decided, as he guessed his dad must have done when he was younger, that the only way to stop being afraid and resentful of his powers was to stop hiding them and use them. As far as he could see, there was only one way of doing that properly.

And Jules was still horribly aware of why he was created in the first place and scared of what that meant for him. Even in the darkness where their minds met, Jules couldn't verbalise what he was truly afraid of: that he was made as a weapon and as such would be best placed in the hands of people who only used weapons as a last resort and, even then, used them responsibly.

"I thought you'd gotten rid of all the kryptonite?" Johnny's dad asked finally, rousing Johnny from his thoughts.

"We removed everything we could find from Smallville but it was there, out in the open, for years. I have a list of people that I know definitely have their own reserves, but I don't think that will help us to either keep Johnny safe or to find out who made that robot. Anyone could have taken some for themselves if they knew where to look and, if they were sensible enough not to gloat about it, there's no way of knowing who they are."

Johnny's mom sighed, her fingers trailing down Johnny's arm as she stood up. "I can barely keep my eyes open. I'm going to make coffee."

"We'll come with you." Johnny's dad started to rise from his chair, but Lex stilled him with a small shake of his head.

"I need to speak to Clark privately for a moment, Lois," Lex said, slipping into the chair Johnny's mom had just vacated. "I hope you don't mind."

Johnny's mom frowned, but she left without another word, closing the door behind her quietly.

Johnny's dad cocked his head after she'd gone, obviously using his super-hearing. "She's in the kitchen," he said after a minute or so had passed. "What did you want to talk to me about?"

"What happened out there today, Clark?" Lex's voice was so low that Johnny had to strain his ears to hear it. "I know that you didn't fight that thing. I've cleaned up after you enough times to recognise your handiwork, and that wasn't it."

Johnny's heart was thumping so loudly in the silence that followed Lex's question that he was afraid that his dad and Lex would be able to hear it. Then they'd probably be annoyed with him for pretending to still be asleep and he might never get to hear what had happened after he had passed out.

Maybe another superhero had defeated Goliath while Johnny's dad was preoccupied with the Atomizer and what had happened to Johnny. Maybe the robot had self-destructed and there hadn't been a fight after all. Or maybe a dimensional rift had opened up over Metropolis and sucked it in, because that sort of thing happened from time to time in the city.

Johnny hardly dared breathe as his dad answered Lex's question. "It was Jules," he said, cupping the back of Lex's head with one huge hand. "Jules happened."

Lex wrapped his fingers around Johnny's dad's wrist, his eyes wide and disbelieving. "Jules did that? My Jules?"

"Yes." Johnny's dad pulled Lex toward him and pressed their foreheads together. "He was screaming and struggling to get free after Johnny fell and I was terrified that I was going to drop him, but then he went completely still and... just stared at that thing and it burst apart, nuts and bolts flying everywhere. He dismantled it with his mind, I guess. It was all over in seconds and I've never seen anything like it before."

Lex's breathing was loud and ragged and Johnny thought that he might be about to start crying, which would be mortifying. Even if Lex didn't know that Johnny was watching, Johnny would be embarrassed enough for the both of them.

But Lex didn't burst into tears - much to Johnny's undying gratitude - he started laughing. He laughed loudly and slightly hysterically, his arms wrapping around Johnny's dad's waist tightly.

"Fuck, Clark." It almost sounded as though Lex was sobbing now. "What have I...? I didn't think..."

Lex couldn't seem to finish any of his sentences and his shoulders shook as Johnny's dad stroked his back over and over, murmuring soft things that Johnny couldn't quite make out.

When Lex's shaking subsided, he pushed Johnny's dad away gently and rubbed at his dry eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "No wonder Jules looked as though he was about to collapse. I thought it was because he'd been so scared but now..." Lex shook his head. "He never said anything about any of this."

"It's not because he's scared of what you'll do," Johnny's dad said, catching hold of Lex's hand and pulling it away from his face. "He was just a little overwhelmed, I think."

"I know," Lex said, but Johnny didn't think he sounded convinced.

Johnny was surprised that Lex even felt that way. Jules might sometimes wish that he was normal and that his dad had chosen someone with different powers to steal genetic material from, but he never wished that he had a different father. He definitely wasn't scared that Lex would use him for the purpose for which he was created. He half-wanted to tell Lex that, but his throat was still raw and useless and he was supposed to be asleep anyway.

Johnny's dad laced his fingers with Lex's. "We should go and join Lois for that coffee. You can talk to Jules in the morning and get everything sorted out."

Lex nodded and allowed Johnny's dad to pull him to his feet, but his bottom lip was caught between his teeth and he still looked worried.

Johnny's dad moved toward the bed and Johnny screwed his eyes closed hurriedly. His dad's fingers moved through Johnny's hair gently for a moment and then he pressed a brief, dry kiss to his temple.

"We'll be back in a little while," he said and Johnny heard him walking away and opening the door.

His dad's footsteps in the hall quickly faded, but Johnny didn't hear Lex's following them. Johnny concentrated on making his breathing slow and even and fought the temptation to open his eyes to check on what Lex was doing.

"Do you want me to tell your father that you're awake?" Lex asked after a time. His tone was bland, but it still made Johnny's blood run cold.

Johnny opened his eyes cautiously. He expected Lex to look disappointed, perhaps even angry, but he was smiling slightly and looked completely relaxed.

"Jules used to try that trick all the time, especially on Christmas Eve." Lex's smile widened. "I've gotten very good at recognising the signs over the years."

Johnny wanted to explain, to apologise, but his throat closed up around the words. His breath whistled out through his nose and mouth, but carried no sound with it.

Johnny looked at the glass of water on the bedside table, wishing he could move things with his mind like Jules could, but to no avail. The glass stayed stubbornly where it was, droplets of condensation forming enticingly on its surface.

Lex's gaze followed Johnny's and he made a small sound of annoyance before picking up the glass and pressing it to Johnny's chapped lips. "If you were thirsty, you should have said... You should have let us know."

Johnny ignored Lex, concentrating on drinking greedily as Lex tipped the glass. The water was tepid and slightly stale, but Johnny still thought it tasted delicious and it soothed the raw pain in his throat.

When the glass was empty, Lex placed it back on the table and then crouched down beside the bed so that his eyes were level with Johnny's. "Do you need anything else?"

Johnny managed to roll his head back and forth a little against the pillow, and Lex smiled again before getting to his feet. "I'll have Henry come straight up to install a buzzer in case you need anything later."

Lex reached out towards Johnny as if he were going to touch him, perhaps place his hand against Johnny's forehead or smooth back his hair, but he obviously decided against it, fingers curling into his palm as he turned away from the bed.

Johnny felt awkward as he stared, unblinking, at the back of Lex's head. He wanted to apologise for his pretence, for hearing and seeing things that Lex probably would have wanted to stay private.

But Johnny wasn't good with words and he never knew the right thing to say. However, he thought there might be one thing, at least, he could tell Lex. Something that might make him feel better and go someway towards making up for what Johnny had done.

"Jules," Johnny rasped, fighting the urge to cough. "Jules could never be scared of you. You're his hero."

"I thought that was Batman," Lex said, the catch in his voice belying the flippancy of his words.

He squeezed Johnny's shoulder firmly before walking away from the bed. He paused in the bedroom doorway, his head bowed, before saying, "Thank you," in a quiet, almost awed, voice.

He was gone before Johnny had chance to thank him in return.

Johnny found that he could move a little more easily the next morning, but he was still far too weak to get out of bed on his own. His dad had to carry him to the bathroom, which went far beyond embarrassing and into a whole new realm of humiliation that Johnny had never even believed was possible before.

Aside from the bathroom breaks, which Johnny tried to postpone until his bladder felt as though it was going to rupture, he found that he quite enjoyed his first day of convalescence. His grandma made him delicious soup that he was allowed to eat in bed, his dad fussed around him like a mother hen, and his mom even dropped in on her lunch break, although she did spend most of the time that she wasn't stroking his hair and looking distraught tapping away on her laptop because she had a story due.

When Jules returned home from school, he came straight to Johnny's room with a stack of games and his new X-Box Revolution, which he usually kept jealously guarded in his own room lest anyone wear it out with their eyes by admiring it too much.

He flopped down onto the end of Johnny's bed, kicking off his shoes and throwing his tie onto the floor with a careless disregard that he only demonstrated when his dad wasn't around to make disapproving faces and pointed comments about creating unnecessary work for the cleaning staff.

Jules filled Johnny in on the day's events at school as they played video games. Jules' stories always made school sound a lot more interesting than Johnny knew it to be, but that could have just been the way that he told them: accompanied by exaggerated hand gestures, bad impressions of their teachers, and rambling asides about the sexual proclivities of their classmates' parents. Either that, or everyone just waited until Johnny was out of the way before they went insane.

Later, Mrs. Branch, the housekeeper, brought Jules' dinner up on a tray and a fresh jug of water and bowl of soup for Johnny. Before she left, she glared at Jules' tie and shoes until he was shamed into picking them up and putting them away in their proper place. Johnny liked Mrs. Branch. She reminded him of his grandma and the two of them had in fact become fast friends, sharing coffee together in the mornings before everyone else got up, and gossiping about whatever it was that old ladies gossiped about.

After the dinner things had been cleared away and Johnny and Jules had settled in to watch TV, Lex knocked on Johnny's open door. He was still wearing a suit and tie, obviously fresh from the office, and laden down with several large bags, the straps of which were looped around his arms.

"Could you give me a hand, Jules?" he asked. "There are a couple of boxes in the hallway, if you wouldn't mind getting them."

"Sure, Dad," Jules said, sliding off the bed with a grin.

Lex returned the grin as he dropped the bags onto the bed beside Johnny. Johnny thought that Lex and Jules seemed just as happy to see each other as they usually did, and he could only hope that they'd had their talk and all had gone well. If it hadn't, no doubt he'd have heard about it in long and painful detail from Jules.

"How are you feeling today?" Lex asked and his hand did that hovering thing again, where it looked like he wanted to touch Johnny's head but didn't think that the contact would be welcome.

"A bit better, thank you," Johnny's said, his voice a little raspy again from chatting to Jules for the past couple of hours.

Lex frowned. "Are you drinking enough water?" he asked, and this time he did press the back of his hand to Johnny's forehead, but only for the briefest of moments.

"Yes, I'm drinking enough water," Johnny replied without thinking, because he'd said the same thing to his own dad several times already that day. Johnny was quickly learning to judge exactly how much water he could drink to keep his throat from hurting and yet not have to buzz his dad every five minutes for one of their awful bathroom breaks.

"What is all this crap?" Jules asked as he staggered back into the bedroom, his face hidden behind two enormous cardboard boxes.

"It's not crap," Lex said distractedly. "All the money I'm spending on your education and you can't think of a better way of expressing yourself than using coarse vernacular?"

"Sorry, Dad." Jules put the boxes down on Johnny's desk and then perched on the end of the bed. "What's all this stuff, then?"

"A marginal improvement, I suppose," Lex said as he started unpacking the bags he'd brought with him. "I just thought that Johnny could get bored, what with being confined to his room all day, so I picked a few things up after work that I thought might help make the time pass a little more quickly."

Lex seemed to have gone all out in his quest to keep Johnny amused and Johnny suspected that his dad and grandma had been quite thoroughly quizzed on his preferences at some point. There were piles of the film and photography magazines he liked, several books that he'd been meaning to read, a couple of video games he'd thought hadn't even been released yet, and an X-Box Revolution.

Jules made a quiet moan of anguish at that last item. "I had to beg for months to get one of those. And clean all of your cars. Twice."

Lex shrugged off Jules' distress and walked over to the desk to collect the boxes that Jules had left there.

Jules shuffled up the bed so that he and Johnny were sitting side by side. "You lucky bastard," he whispered. "If I'd known that all it took was a near-fatal rock allergy, I would have tried to develop one myself."

Johnny knew what Lex was doing. Richard had tried it as well, back when he first started going out with Johnny's mom: trying to buy Johnny's affection and acceptance with cool gifts. He'd stopped when it became obvious that Johnny was fine with Richard and his mom dating and that the two of them got along well enough without any money being spent. He hoped that Lex would come to the same realisation in time, because it made Johnny a little uncomfortable to be the recipient of such largesse, although he didn't want to say anything in case he hurt Lex's feelings.

"Sorry," Johnny said. "I didn't ask for any of this."

"I know you didn't." Jules rolled his eyes as if he were amazed at Johnny's stupidity. "Dad's just trying to butter you up. I think he's worried that you don't like him."

That surprised Johnny. He didn't dislike Lex at all; he just didn't know him very well. He guessed that he didn't really try to talk to Lex much, even avoided it, but that was because Lex made him nervous. Lex Luthor was someone that Johnny had read about in the papers and seen on TV as he was growing up - the richest man in America and the undisputed Prince of Metropolis - and it was hard for Johnny to know what to say to someone like that. Everything he considered seemed childish, stupid or irrelevant.

Lex was intimidating to Johnny even when he was clearly going out of his way to be approachable.

"Do you like comics?" Lex asked as he carried one of the now open boxes to the bed.

"They're okay, I guess," Johnny said, shrugging.

He liked the work of some comic book artists, but he'd never really read any comics, apart from a couple of the Justice League titles that DC published. Even then, it was mainly for the amusement factor of seeing the home life that they'd imagined for Superman, where he was married to a beautiful Martian woman and lived on the moon with his brood of unfeasibly attractive teenage daughters.

"I found these helped me through me through a time in my life when I was very ill, though I was a little younger than you." Lex held out a bagged comic toward Johnny, looking slightly sheepish as if he were worried that his offering wouldn't be well-received.

Johnny thanked Lex as he took the comic. It was Warrior Angel, a title that Johnny had never read, but the cover seemed vaguely familiar.

"That's Warrior Angel number one," Jules exclaimed, grabbing at Johnny's arm as though struggling to keep himself from collapsing. "You're letting him read Warrior Angel number one? You never let me read any of your comics."

"I've got two copies," Lex said, smirking. "And I used to let you read my comics, but then you repaid my kindness by drawing moustaches on all of the characters. And a wig on Warrior Angel." Lex made this sound like the greatest sin that a person could ever commit.

"I was eight," Jules grumbled. "I didn't have a true appreciation for vintage comics."

"Then, last year, I let you read issues two hundred through two-one-eight so that you could gain a better understanding of Devilicus' descent into villainy. You spilled juice on them and then hid them under your bed. They'd grown mould by the time Mrs. Branch finally recovered them."

Johnny muttered something that was possibly coarse vernacular under his breath. "Fine. Is it acceptable if I read them over Johnny's shoulder?"

"I don't see how that could be a problem," Lex said with a smile. He ruffled Jules' hair as Jules scowled and then made his way to the door. "I hope you enjoy them, Johnny."

"Thanks, Lex," Johnny called after Lex as he left.

Johnny carefully slid the comic from its plastic cover with gentle fingers. Its pages were yellowed with age, but it was in otherwise pristine condition.

"I hope he gets over this soon," Jules said, digging his chin into Johnny's shoulder as he leaned over to see the comic when Johnny opened it. "I'm supposed to be the spoiled rich kid in this partnership. You're my culturally backward and slightly dim sidekick, whom I've taken under my wing out of the goodness of my heart and a certain amount of pity. I trust you won't get ideas above your station."

Johnny grunted to acknowledge that he'd heard Jules, but otherwise did not reply as he started to read. Even considering the exorbitant price of the X-Box, the other presents had probably meant very little to Lex as he could easily afford them, but this was something personal. It meant a lot to Johnny that Lex had trusted him with this and he was determined that he was going to try his best to appreciate it, even if comics weren't really his thing.

Johnny didn't read the magazines, or the books, or even play on his new X-Box. He spent the next two days completely immersed in the world of Warrior Angel.

Sure, some of the early issues hung together on the most outlandish or flimsy of premises and the later issues were dogged by continuity errors which had to be wiped clean with regular crisis events, but they were addictive.

Warrior Angel was brave and always had a sarcastic quip ready even in the middle of a fight and Devilicus was a strangely sympathetic and complex character, whom Johnny almost wished that Warrior Angel could save as he wanted to.

He even read some of the comics twice because Jules would demand that he re-read the more important story arcs with him after school. Johnny's dad seemed to find Johnny's new obsession amusing, saying that he felt Warrior Angel's adventures were frankly unbelievable. Johnny privately thought that his dad was probably the last person on Earth who could make that judgement, given what he did as Superman.

Johnny also found that he could have a proper conversation with Lex, if only about the comics, and he wondered if maybe that had been the real reason Lex had lent them to him. They talked about the characterisations, the relative merits of the various writers and artists, and on the Wednesday night they even had an argument about their differing interpretations of Devilicus' character, which was generally good-natured, but did become a little heated towards the end and voices were raised.

Johnny's dad had to step in and break it up eventually, laughing the whole time, and afterwards he told Johnny that if he was well enough to be shouting about comic books then he was more than well enough to be going back to school.

Johnny was going to contest that assumption - he still felt weak and got a little dizzy if he stood up for too long - but when his dad pointed out that if he wasn't well enough to go school for the next two days, then he definitely shouldn't be going to San Francisco at the weekend to take up his invitation to join the Teen Titans, he thought it prudent not to say anything at all.

He went back to school the next day.

Johnny tried not to stare at Starfire's ass as she showed them around the Titans Tower. It was kind of difficult as her ass was bright orange and her costume virtually nonexistent, but he found that if he kept his eyes fixed on the top of her head then he could almost pretend she was wearing a nice long overcoat and not what appeared to be cunningly applied tape.

Jules wasn't even trying not to look, but he had the benefit of his mask to hide his ogling behind.

"Stop staring, Jules, you pervert." Johnny elbowed Jules in the ribs when they stopped by the memorial for fallen Titans and Starfire started reciting their names and how they'd died, presumably just in case they weren't already nervous enough.

"I can't help it," Jules whined. "She's a very attractive woman and she's practically naked. I'm not strong enough to fight my hormones, Johnny. You're asking too much of me."

"Well, I'm managing it, so I think you can too. You're just not trying hard enough."

If he was honest, Johnny didn't even find Starfire that attractive. He felt compelled to look because it wasn't often he saw someone wandering around wearing so little when they weren't on a beach, but his hormones weren't even getting involved in the matter. His hormones seemed to do very little but tell him to eat second helpings at dinner to lay in reserves for his next growth spurt, something which had worried him for a while.

He'd talked to his dad about it once recently, scared that his freaky heritage had made him defective in some way, and his dad had blushingly delivered a speech about how different people matured at different rates and given him a book with some very graphic pictures from Lex's extensive library of parenting guides. Johnny hadn't been able to get away fast enough.

He'd hidden the book at the bottom of his closet under a big pile of sweaters that he seldom wore and vowed to never think of the whole horrible experience again.

After Starfire had finished her morbid list, she showed them to what appeared to be some sort of common room to wait for the rest of the Titans to arrive. Jules didn't even watch her leave, which Johnny chose to claim as a moral victory on his part.

"This place is amazing," Jules said, sprawling out on an uncomfortable-looking curvy grey couch. "I can't believe we're actually here at last."

Johnny sat down next to Jules and scanned the room uneasily. Something about the silent immensity of the tower made him nervous about the enormity of the task they'd just signed up for. "Aren't you worried about this at all? I mean, we've practiced and everything, but these guys have done it all before. They're experienced. What if we don't fit in? What if we screw up? What if -"

"Don't worry about it, John." Jules flung an arm around Johnny's shoulders, the stiff leather of his glove scratching along the skin of Johnny's neck. "I'll be looking out for you. If someone wants to hurt you, they'll have to come through me."

Johnny smiled, remembering what his dad had said about how Jules had ripped Goliath into tiny pieces just because Johnny had been hurt. "Yeah, I know you will, Jules. It won't help if they just don't like us, though."

Jules chuckled dryly. "I don't think you need to worry about that. You're Superman's son. If they knew whose son I was, I doubt they'd have let me through the door. Superheroes don't seem to like my dad very much for some reason."

Johnny's dad had used to feel the same way, not too long ago. Johnny had to wonder exactly how much Jules knew about the sort of reputation his dad had in certain circles. "Jules," he began, but was distracted from the rest of what he wanted to say when Robin strode into the room.

Jules' hand tightened on the back of Johnny's neck and his whole body stiffened. Johnny grinned and reached up to prise Jules' fingers free. Jules had a severe case of hero worship for Batman and Robin, something which Lex glibly blamed on the Batmobile and Jules' hereditary weakness for fast cars.

Jules' hand dropped down heavily by his side when Johnny let go of it, and he seemed lost for words - an almost unprecedented occurrence - staring at Robin just as avidly as he had been staring at Starfire earlier.

Robin stared back at Jules silently from the doorway, making no move to approach them. Normally, Johnny relied on Jules to be the one to make introductions and conversation, but he suspected that he might be sitting there all day before Jules plucked up enough courage to say anything.

He might be shy, but Johnny had had good manners drummed into him from practically the moment of his birth. He got up and walked over to Robin, his hand extended. "Hi, I'm -"

"Superboy," Robin said, eyes leaving Jules' masked face as he accepted Johnny's hand. His grip was surprisingly strong for a human. "And that's Morpheus. We were told to expect you today."

Robin smiled faintly and for a moment he reminded Johnny of someone, although he couldn't summon up a name.

"You can call me Jon-El. Jon," Johnny said as he and Robin shook hands. Although he didn't much like the Kryptonian name that the AI had saddled him with, he'd decided that it had to be better than being called Superboy all the time.

"Jon," Robin echoed, his smile broadening.

Jules nearly knocked Johnny over in his eagerness to get in on the Robin hand-shaking action, his previous bashfulness obviously forgotten. He pumped Robin's hand vigorously as he introduced himself, and Johnny thought that Robin looked slightly nervous at Jules' exuberance. He certainly snatched his hand back with surprising speed as soon as Jules gave him the chance to.

Robin was soon followed by Wondergirl and Bart Allen - otherwise known as Impulse - a hyperactive red-haired kid who reminded Johnny very strongly of Jules. Robin introduced them all, and it soon became clear that Jules had become something of a celebrity in the superhero world.

Bart and Wondergirl excitedly quizzed Jules on his fight with Goliath and his powers, which Jules was more than happy to demonstrate by making the furniture float around the room and guessing the numbers and phrases they were thinking of, which was a favourite party piece of his.

Johnny hung back from the three of them, already feeling a little out of place. He curled himself up on the couch that he and Jules had been sitting on earlier and watched his friend flirt with Wondergirl and make Bart double up with laughter.

"Do you know Morpheus from outside the Titans?" Robin asked, sitting down next to Johnny, straight-backed and neat.

Johnny scrambled upright so that his pose mirrored Robin's. "Yeah, he's my best friend. We, erm, we go to school together."

Robin nodded once, an economical tilt of his head that was hardly a movement at all. "Is he always like this?"

Johnny grinned. "He likes showing off. He's not always quite this noisy though."

Robin's lips curled upwards at the corners slightly. Johnny wished that he could see Robin's eyes, because it was hard to read his expression properly behind the mask, even though it was tiny.

It didn't seem as if Robin was going to say anything else, he just sat there, still and quiet, his eyes fixed on Johnny's face. Johnny cast around for something, anything, to say to keep his end of the conversation up. God, he was bad at this.

"So what do you guys get up to around here when you're not, you know, fighting crime?" Johnny winced. Fighting crime? He sounded so lame.

If Robin thought he was lame it didn't show in his face, but then he looked as if he could go head to head with Lex in an inscrutability contest and hold his own. "Hang out, watch movies, play video games," Robin shrugged. "The usual sort of stuff."

Johnny had always suspected that was the case and he couldn't wait to tell Jules, who had insisted that the Titans would practice their fighting moves and battle formations until their joints bled during their downtime.

Johnny glanced over towards Jules with the intention of giving him a look that would make him aware of Johnny's inherent superiority in all areas of superheroing knowledge. But Jules was already staring at Johnny, his arms folded across his chest, seemingly unaware of the string of questions that an animated Bart was firing at him. The sight made Johnny feel unaccountably guilty, even though he was one sitting on the sidelines while Jules was mobbed by his nascent fan club, and he decided to leave his crowing until another time.

"Did Starfire show you your rooms?" Robin asked, drawing Johnny's scattered attention back towards him again.

"No, but we're not going to be staying overnight anyway. We're only here today to meet everyone and see the Tower. We're just going to be on call. Back-up members."

Even though he and Jules were desperate to become Titans, there had never been any question that they wouldn't be spending every weekend in San Francisco with the rest of the team. Jules couldn't sleep in his mask and it was too risky for him to take it off, even in the relative safety of the Titans Tower and Johnny could only ever really spend quality time with his mom at the weekend. He wanted this, but never to the exclusion of everything else.

"Oh," Robin said, and Johnny thought that he sounded a little disappointed. "I think you should come and see the rooms anyway, they're -"

Cyborg burst into the room at a flat out run, almost barrelling into Jules before he stopped. "Titans, there's something happening in Edge City. The JLA are already there, but they need backup. They need us."

Johnny's stomach clenched tightly and he felt a little nauseous. He thought they'd have a bit more time to settle in, but it was time, at last, to see if he and Jules could be the heroes that they thought they could be.

The air in Edge City was thick with smoke and rang with the scream of sirens. Johnny held one hand over his mouth as he picked his way through the rubble and burnt-out shells of cars that littered the streets, the ground beneath his feet rumbling with the aftershocks of the explosions that were ripping through the business district. His other hand was curled around Jules' arm, helping his friend stay upright and moving.

Johnny's daydreams about being a superhero had never been anything like this. He'd never imagined the stench of burning flesh that it seemed he tasted rather than smelled: a thick viscous liquid sliding down his throat with every breath he took, which settled like lead in his stomach. He'd never imagined how small and useless he would feel, seeing the twisted and broken bodies of people he couldn't have saved, even if he'd been able to get to them in time.

He wondered how his dad did it, day after day, year after year. When Superman had met them after they landed in the city, his face was a little drawn, but his eyes were resolute. Johnny had never seen anyone but his dad when his dad was wearing his costume, but today he'd seen Superman and he'd seen why people trusted him with their lives and their futures.

It was Superman who kept the people of Edge City calm as the JLA evacuated the city. If he felt any fear at all it didn't show in his expression and his voice was strong and steady. It was Superman who directed the disparate groups of superheroes that converged to help in the fight and it was obvious to Johnny how much they respected him and his judgement.

Johnny had never been more proud of his dad in his life.

By the time the Titans had arrived, the robots' numbers were diminishing, but there were still replacements for those destroyed arriving from somewhere. Batman had narrowed their possible point of origin down to a section of the city that covered roughly four blocks and Superman had directed Johnny, Jules and Robin to pinpoint the exact location and report back.

Johnny suspected that his dad had selected them for this mission because it took them away from the more dangerous areas of the city where most of the fighting was taking place. Although Johnny thought that he should probably feel a little insulted that his dad didn't have more faith in his ability to protect himself, he was honestly more relieved than anything else.

He'd seen one of the robots scuttling along the side of a building, high above the streets. It looked a little like a spider, with a small spherical body supported by six long, many-jointed legs ending in wicked spikes that smashed through widows and sent cracks racing through the concrete walls as it moved. It was the size of a pony.

Robin didn't seem very happy at being sent away from the action. He was moving quickly, leaping nimbly over any debris that blocked his path, and didn't slow his pace or make any compensation for the fact that Jules and Johnny weren't as agile as he was. When he did have to wait for a moment so that they could regroup, he looked irritated and restless, never truly stopping moving, and he used the opportunity to check the map Batman had given them or poke through the blackened remains of buildings that the robots had already overwhelmed and destroyed.

Eventually, Johnny had to pick Jules up and fly after Robin. He could have used his super-speed and smashed through any obstacles in his way, but he wasn't going to leave Jules behind or risk him getting hurt.

Johnny could feel the slow tremors running through Jules' body as he held him. His own hands were shaking and so slick with sweat that he was terrified that he might drop Jules, so he tightened his grip, wrapping the loose cloth of Jules' shirt around his fingers.

"Are you okay?" Johnny asked, his mouth close to what he judged was the most likely position of Jules' ear beneath his mask.

"I'm fine," Jules whispered back, although his heart was beating humming-bird-fast beneath Johnny's palm. "I just didn't think it would be so... fucking scary, I guess. They make it look so easy on the news reports, don't they?"

"I'm looking out for you too," Johnny said, pressing his forehead against Jules' temple. "If we've got each others' backs, we'll get through this."

Jules chuckled, a quick burst of static emanating from his voice distorter. "I wish I had your confidence."

"You totally destroyed Goliath, Jules, and he was ten times the size of these guys."

Another crackle of static. "I don't have a fucking clue how I did it, though. I was scared and angry and it just... happened. If it takes you being in danger for me to be able to do it again, I think I'd rather find some other way to fight them."

Johnny had been relying on Jules being able to protect them if they ran into any robots at close quarters, which had perhaps been a little foolish on his part. He knew Jules had no real idea of how his powers worked or how to use them. They were erratic, fluctuating wildly in strength and accuracy on a daily basis. Johnny would have to trust that his own abilities would keep them safe.

Johnny's dad had warned him that some of the robots were armed with kryptonite as Goliath had been. It scared Johnny, especially as his body still remembered the pain from his last encounter with the rocks - a phantom ache that made him wake in the middle of the night, drenched with sweat - but it was a fear he had to conquer if he wanted to keep on doing this. If Lex was right, then maybe he would develop some immunity to the kryptonite's effects if he was exposed to it more often. It could be a good thing.

The thought was hardly reassuring and he still felt like he might faint whenever he saw the glint of sunlight on metal from the streets below.

As he flew over a large warehouse that had lost half of its roof and one of its walls, his eyes fixed on Robin's small form so that he could keep pace with him, Jules suddenly cried out in alarm and tugged on Johnny's arm.

"Did you see that?" Jules said, fingers gripping the back of Johnny's head and forcing him to look down. "That place was full of robots, but they're just standing there, as if they're waiting for something. Do you think that's where they're being stored?"

Johnny banked hard and circled back over the warehouse. Beneath the skeleton of charred beams that had once supported the roof, Johnny saw the dark hulking shapes of several robots, arranged in ranks. An army awaiting the order to attack.

He hit the ground running, calling for Robin. He set Jules down carefully, steadying him with a hand in the centre of his back, before scrambling over the ruin of the fallen wall.

"Can you see anything?" Robin asked, his shoulder bumping against Johnny's as he crouched beside him.

Johnny scanned the room, wishing that he had inherited his dad's enhanced sight. Despite the warehouse's new skylight, the light was still poor inside, darkened with ash and dust and it took several minutes for Johnny's eyesight to adjust. When it did, Johnny noticed a small movement at the far end of the building; the merest flicker of something pale against the dark grey floor.

Robin's breathing hitched and, before Johnny had chance to stop him, he was jumping down into the warehouse, cape billowing out like a parachute behind him. "It's a man," Robin said as he weaved in and out of the legs of the slumbering robots. "He's been hurt."

Johnny reached back for Jules' hand and, ignoring Jules' indignant squawk of protest, pulled him up into his arms, drawing level with Robin with a burst of super-speed.

"I wish you'd give me some warning before you do things like that," Jules grumbled, pressing his face against Johnny's chest. "It always makes me dizzy if you don't give me chance to prepare myself."

As they drew nearer to the man, he groaned and raised one hand weakly, extending it towards them. He left his fingers behind on the floor.

Johnny gagged and pressed his hand against the back of Jules' neck so that his friend couldn't turn around.

"What is it, Jon?" Jules asked, sounding an equal mixture of scared and annoyed.

"God." Johnny could taste the bile rising at the back of his mouth. "You don't want to see it if you don't have to."

Robin dropped to his knees beside the man. "We're going to get you to a hospital," he said.

His voice was quiet and soothing, but Johnny could see the slight tremor in his hands as they carefully pulled aside the man's clothing. When he beckoned for Johnny to come over and join him, his gloves shone in the hazy light, slick with blood.

"You'll have to carry this man somewhere safe. Get him some medical attention," Robin said. "Morpheus and I will look around here and see if we can find anything that might give us some clue as to who set this up."

Johnny set Jules onto the floor and reluctantly let go of him. Jules kept his face pressed against Johnny's chest for a moment before turning around. He inhaled sharply, but otherwise did not betray any other signs of the fear and disgust that Johnny knew he must be feeling.

Johnny had to fight those emotions himself as he bent to pick the man up. He was soaked in blood from countless cuts, some so deep that Johnny could see bone shining whitely within them. Someone or something had burnt a symbol into the man's forehead, its exact shape indecipherable against the swollen red skin surrounding it.

As Johnny slipped an arm beneath the man's head, his eyes shot open. His pupils were so wide that the pale blue of his irises was almost obliterated by them.

"Luthor," the man said, bloody spittle welling at the corners of his mouth. "You have to warn... Luthor. It wasn't supposed... must tell Luthor." His good hand wrapped around Johnny's wrist for a moment before he fell back against Johnny's arm limply.

Robin was at Johnny's side in an instant. "What was that about Lex Luthor?"

Johnny shook his head. "I don't know. He wasn't making any sense."

Robin pressed his fingers against the man's neck, just below his jaw. "He's still alive, but his pulse is weakening. I don't think he's going to last much longer, but we need to know what he knows about Luthor. If he's mixed up in this then we're in trouble." Robin's head swung towards Jules. "It's fortunate we have a telepath with us."

Jules took a couple of steps away from Robin, holding his hands up in front of him as if he were warding the suggestion away. "I don't like reading people's thoughts. Besides, Lex Luthor wouldn't be involved in anything like this."

"You wouldn't think that if you'd been doing this for longer," Robin said. "Luthor isn't the benign philanthropist he'd like the world to believe he is."

Normally, Johnny would have sided with Jules. He understood how abhorrent his friend found the idea of poking through other people's thoughts and memories, but Jules hadn't seen how terrified the man had appeared to be as he spoke Lex's name. Whether he was terrified of Lex or for Lex, Johnny hadn't been able to tell, but he knew Jules would be able to if he tried.

"Morpheus, please," Johnny said, looking straight into Jules' green goggles and wishing he could see his friend's eyes rather than just the distorted reflection of his own pale face. "We need to know why he was saying that name. It could be important."

Jules took a deep breath, leaning forward with his hands resting on his thighs. "Okay, but only to prove to you that Lex Luthor had nothing to do with these... things."

Robin moved out of the way so that Jules could crouch down beside the wounded man. Jules placed his hand gingerly on the man's face, careful to avoid touching the livid burn on his forehead. Johnny knew that Jules didn't need to actually make contact with someone to be able to read their mind, but he guessed that Jules needed the comfort of having him nearby. He wrapped his arm around Jules' waist and Jules leant his weight against him gratefully.

The man's eyes moved restlessly behind his closed eyelids and a low moan escaped his lips. His body trembled and his legs kicked up once, twice, before suddenly stiffening. The scream that then ripped out of his throat was echoed by Jules. The two of them screamed in unison, Jules' back arching against Johnny's chest, until the man's breath ran out and he became completely still.

Jules snatched his hand away from the man and wiped it down the front of his pants, leaving a darker smear of blood across the dark green fabric. He pushed Johnny's arm away and scrabbled backwards making a low keening noise that made Johnny's heart clench painfully hard.

"What did you see?" Robin asked, brisk and businesslike.

Jules clawed at his mask. "Nothing. Everything. Fuck, I can't breathe. I need to get this thing off."

Johnny let the man's head fall to the floor as he rushed to Jules' side and then steered him behind one of the robots. He trusted that Robin wouldn't follow. No one understood the importance of secret identities better than a superhero.

Jules ripped the bottom half of his mask from his neck and pushed it up so that it bunched beneath his nose. Then he squatted down on his haunches and was very noisily, very messily, sick.

Johnny sat down and pulled Jules backwards until he rested in the V of Johnny's outstretched legs. He rubbed Jules' back between his shoulder blades and made nonsense noises of encouragement as Jules heaved. He'd never thrown up himself, but he'd seen people do so enough times on TV to know that it seemed to be the right thing to do.

When Jules was finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then rested his forehead against his knees. "Fuck," he said, breathing raggedly. "That was... Don't ever ask me to do that again."

Johnny was almost afraid to ask, but: "What happened?"

"What do you think happened?" Jules' voice was raw and thin. "He died in my fucking head, Johnny. I didn't hear anything about my dad, or robots, or anything else that you wanted me to find out. There was just pain and chaos and then nothing at all. You can't even... I don't want to talk about it anymore."

All of Jules' usual good humour and lightness were stripped away and he sounded so unlike himself that it made Johnny's chest hurt. "I didn't know. I'm sorry."

Jules squeezed Johnny's leg gently. "You've got nothing to be sorry about. I didn't know any more than you, but now I do -"

Jules retched again, but instead of vomiting, he brought up blood: bright red blood that splashed over the shiny leather of Jules' boots and the bottom of Johnny's jeans. He made a noise like a deflating balloon and then slumped forward, his limbs going lax.

Johnny panicked; fear like cold water washing over his skin. He fumbled blindly for Jules, hooking a finger under his chin and tilting his head back so that their faces were almost touching. Blood trickled down Jules' pale cheeks from beneath his goggles and his chin was stained crimson with it. Johnny couldn't hear him breathing.

Johnny threw back his head and screamed for Superman as loudly as he could.

Fear made Johnny clumsy as he ripped off Jules' mask and his thumbs punched through the reinforced plastic lenses of the goggles, coating Jules' wet skin with tiny green shards that glittered like jewels.

Beneath the tight fabric of the hood, Jules' hair had turned almost black with sweat and it clung to his scalp in tight corkscrew curls. Beads of blood were forming at the corners of his closed eyes, growing steadily until they became too heavy and broke to slide like tears down his cheeks.

Johnny screamed for Superman again, his voice breaking on the last syllable.

Robin's feet touched the ground almost as softly as the dust that was settling all around them and Johnny sensed more than heard him approach.

"What's happened?" Robin asked. "Has Morpheus been hurt?"

Johnny instinctively curled his body around Jules and placed his hands gently over Jules' face, shielding him from Robin's eyes. Warm air gusted over Johnny's damp palms and he could have cried with relief. Jules was alive, although his breathing was shallow and irregular.

"He's alive," Johnny told Robin. "He hasn't been injured, but he's still bleeding. I don't know what's wrong with him."

"Maybe I could help if you let me take a look at him?" Robin's voice gradually grew louder until Johnny guessed that he must be standing right behind them. He held Jules even more tightly. Lex would never forgive him if Robin caught a glimpse of Jules' face.

"No," Johnny said quickly. "No, that's okay. Superman will be here soon and he'll be able to help Morpheus."

Robin's cape whispered against his legs as he shifted his weight. "Superman might not come. He and the rest of the JLA will be busy with the robots for some time. If you'd just let me..." Robin's fingers brushed Johnny's left shoulder lightly and Johnny cringed away from the contact.

Robin was right. Johnny couldn't go crying for his dad every time that something went wrong, especially not if Superman was doing something as important as saving the people of Edge City. If Johnny wanted to hero then he'd better start acting like one.

"If Superman's not going to come, I should look after Morpheus myself. I promised I would." Johnny stood up slowly, careful not to jolt Jules in case he was injured somewhere deep inside where Johnny couldn't see. "When you see Superman, tell him that Morpheus is... ill. Tell him I've taken him home."

Robin didn't say anything to indicate that he agreed with Johnny's request, but neither did he try to stop Johnny from launching himself into the air.

Johnny hovered over the warehouse for a moment, wondering whether he'd made the right decision. Superman had ordered them to find where the robots were coming from and report back. Johnny was leaving the task half-finished, but he knew that Robin would make sure that their discovery was made known. He also knew that Jules was in a bad way and that there was only one person that Lex trusted enough to take care of his son's health.

Johnny made sure that his grip on Jules was secure and then speeded towards Metropolis and home.

Jules stirred in Johnny's arms as they passed over the slowly spinning globe atop the Daily Planet building.

"What's happening?" he asked groggily. "Why are we in Metropolis?"

Johnny couldn't resist hugging Jules closer to his chest. "You collapsed in the warehouse after you read that guy's mind. You were unconscious and bleeding from your... From your eyes. I didn't know what to do, but I thought Dr. Mason might, so I'm taking you home."

"From my eyes?" Jules echoed and tried to lift his hand, presumably so that he could touch his face and check for himself.

"Stop wriggling. I might drop you," Johnny said, trying to sound firm and failing miserably.

He was just too happy that Jules was awake and talking. He felt like flying a few loops in celebration, but the last time he'd tried that Jules had gotten really airsick and he was already in a weakened condition.

Johnny settled for swooping flashily around the globe once before heading back towards the house. It made Jules chuckle and mutter, "Show off," under his breath, which was as good a sign as any that he was feeling a little better.

"You can put me down now," Jules said as they landed on the roof of the house. "I'm feeling a lot stronger and I'm fairly certain I don't need you to carry me around anymore."

Johnny let go of Jules reluctantly, and Jules stood for a moment, grinning at Johnny victoriously, before his knees shook and he started to collapse.

"Yeah," Johnny said, catching Jules before he could fall. "You look fantastic. Really good."

Jules pouted a little as he slipped his arm around Johnny's waist. "I suppose you can still assist me if you like. I know how much you enjoy playing the hero and I wouldn't want to deprive you of that."

"So if I'm the hero, does that make you the damsel in distress?" Johnny asked as he helped Jules towards the stairs that led down into the house.

"Don't push your luck, Kent," Jules growled, but his grin slowly returned, making the blood that had dried around his mouth crack. "I might be too weak to fight back now, but that won't last."

Johnny's own smile was so broad that it made his cheeks hurt. He felt weak and light-headed but yet, at the same time, strangely stronger than ever before. He wondered if this was how Jules had felt after he'd defeated Goliath and knew that Johnny was safe. How a real hero might feel.

He also wanted to hold onto Jules and never let go to make sure that he never got hurt again. He was pretty certain that was how Lex felt every day.

Lex. Shit.

"Jules, I think we'd better get you cleaned up before we see your dad. I think it might actually kill him if he saw you now."

Jules rubbed at his face and then looked at the flakes of dried blood that speckled his fingers in evident dismay. "You're probably right. Lead on."

They made slow progress through the house. Jules could barely walk, but when Johnny had stopped and tried to pick him up, he'd put up a surprisingly good fight.

"I am not a damsel," he'd said, fingers unerringly finding the ticklish spot just below Johnny's ribs. "Please allow me to keep at least the tiniest shred of dignity."

So Johnny had capitulated and continued to drag Jules. It took them almost ten minutes to stumble along the hallway and into the nearest bathroom on the fourth floor. Jules looked absolutely exhausted: his skin pallid and his body shaking.

Johnny gently pushed him down to sit on the edge of the bathtub. Jules swayed alarmingly and Johnny had to steady him with one hand as he reached out to grab a towel with the other, quickly soaking one corner of it under the faucet.

Johnny crouched down between Jules' outspread legs and lightly wiped the wet material over Jules' face, paying particularly close attention to cleaning his crusted eyelashes. Jules' eyes closed and his breathing quickened. A slow blush spread up his neck and across his cheeks which was almost as deep a red as the blood that Johnny was washing away.

"Are you okay?" Johnny asked in concern, rubbing the small of Jules' back comfortingly. "Do you feel like you're going to faint again?"

"I'm fine." Jules' voice was deep and raspy, as though it actually hurt him to speak. "I don't want you nursemaiding me either." He snatched the towel from Johnny and started scrubbing violently at his skin.

"Are you sure? You don't look too good."

"Yes I'm sure. I just can't..." Jules held the towel over his face, hiding his expression from Johnny. "Sorry, I'm just feeling a little bit cranky. I shouldn't be taking it out on you."

"Don't worry about it," Johnny said, tugging at the towel until Jules dropped it. He looked a little shell-shocked but otherwise well now that his face was clean. "I understand."

Jules smiled faintly. "Why was I hurt, Johnny? I remember that we found a warehouse full of robots in Edge City and that we were going to go in, but everything after that is just... black."

Johnny wasn't sure how to tell Jules about what had happened to him. He didn't want to make any painful memories resurface, but he had to make sure that Jules wouldn't try anything like that again.

He told Jules about the man they had found and how he and Robin had persuaded Jules to read his mind despite his misgivings. He skipped quickly over Jules' subsequent collapse, not wanting to remember it in any detail himself.

"Did I find out anything useful?" Jules asked when Johnny had finished his account. His face betrayed no particular emotion, but his grip on the edge of the tub was so tight that his knuckles had turned white under the strain.

Johnny could have told Jules about how the man had cried out Lex's name before he died and how terrified he had appeared as he said it, but Jules seemed so tired and drained, and Johnny was concerned that hearing that about his dad might just serve to make him feel worse. As Jules had said at the time, it probably hadn't meant anything; merely the confused ramblings of a dying man.

Robin would tell Superman about the man's words when they met up again in Edge City. If they were important then he would do everything in his power to discover what the man had wanted to warn Lex about and act accordingly.

Until then, there was no reason for him to make Jules worry unnecessarily.

"No," Johnny said. "Nothing at all."

The robots that attacked Keystone City were much smaller than those in Edge City, but there were more of them. Lots more. Thousands of them, each one no bigger than a mouse, swarming over anything in their path and destroying it with their tiny but very powerful jaws.

They seemed immune to the various weapons that the assembled superheroes had at their command, marching blithely through fire and ice and even a powerful electromagnetic pulse courtesy of one of Batman's newest toys. Several attempts to round them up or redirect their flow into the nearest river had also failed and it seemed as if they would inexorably devour the entire city.

But then Bart had discovered the best way to defeat them through chance clumsiness.

"Ah, the glamorous life of a superhero," Jules said as he stamped heavily on a robot. It exploded beneath his heel, emitting a shower of white sparks and a metallic grating noise that sounded a little like a scream. "If word ever got out that all you have to do is invest in a pair of boots with really thick soles, then I think the club would become much less exclusive very quickly.

"Although why anyone would bother is beyond me. I'm beginning to fear that the reports of beautiful, large-breasted alien women falling over themselves to fulfil your every fantasy as soon as you slip on some spandex are highly exaggerated."

"I think that you're getting real life confused with Star Trek. The best Dad's ever been offered in gratitude after he saved someone was a plate of blueberry muffins," Johnny said with a grin, jumping down heavily on a cluster of four robots and flattening them. "Anyway, stop complaining. You should be glad you're here at all."

Lex and Jules had argued about Jules continuing on with the Teen Titans following the events of the previous weekend and Jules had only won by very solemnly promising to be more careful in future and agreeing to wear even thicker body armour. Lex was apparently still uneasy about the arrangement, however, as Jules had discovered a tracking device tucked inside the cuff of his shirt, which he'd disposed of as they flew over Hobb's River.

They'd probably get into a lot of trouble about that when they got home as Lex was no doubt having the river dredged, terrified that they'd plunged to a watery death.

Jules shrugged. "If you say so. Although I may have to rethink my career options if there isn't a steep increase in the number of scantily clad alien temptresses coming my way in the near future."

Robin called their names before Johnny had a chance to respond. "We think we've found the control centre," he said, waving at them from the doorway of a nearby building. "You need to come and see it."

The room that Robin led them to was illuminated only by the cold light from a bank of computers. Batman was tapping away at one of the consoles, eyes fixed on the complicated series of numbers and letters that were scrolling along the monitor in front of him. Superman stood behind him, arms crossed over his chest.

Every other monitor was set to a screensaver: the black and purple LexCorp logo, dark against a stark white background.

Johnny was standing close enough to Jules that he heard the other boy curse under his breath. He reached out and grabbed Jules' hand, squeezing it as hard as he dared.

Superman obviously heard too as his eyes softened and he took a step towards Jules, before apparently remembering where he was. He offered them a weak and apologetic-looking smile.

Then he turned sharply to look at Robin, his expression hardening once more. "I thought I told you not to get anyone else involved?"

"They saw what happened in Edge City. They were the only people apart from me who did," Robin said, defiant and clearly unfazed by Superman's displeasure. "I thought they might be able to help."

"I doubt it," Batman said, flicking his black cape away from the back of the chair as he stood up. "I can't make any sense of this here without the proper equipment. I'll have to take it all back to the Batcave so I can analyse it thoroughly."

He stalked out of the room, Robin following behind on soft feet. Jules snatched his hand away from Johnny and shuffled after them, ignoring Johnny's whispered enquiry as to whether he was okay. His steps were slow, feet dragging against the ground as if he were too tired to lift them.

Superman laid a hand on Johnny's arm before he could move. "Can I talk to you for a moment, son?" he asked in his normal voice.

The concern etched on his face was entirely Clark Kent's.

"Sure," Johnny said. "What's the matter, Dad?"

"I understand how this must look to you" - Johnny's dad's eyes flicked quickly over the computers as if he couldn't bear to look at them - "especially after what happened in Edge City, but I don't think that Lex had anything to do with this." He shook his head firmly. "No, I know Lex had nothing to do with this."

"How do you know that? Do you know every single thing he does?"

"No," Johnny's dad admitted at length, "but I made the mistake of thinking the worst of him before. He's promised me that he has nothing to do with this sort of thing anymore, and unless I have absolute, irrefutable proof that he's involved with this, I'm not going to accuse him of lying to me. I believe in him, Johnny."

`You have to believe in him, otherwise you couldn't live with yourself for sleeping with him,' Johnny thought and was immediately disgusted with himself. There was no way that his dad would stay with someone who he thought was capable of this, or let his son and mother live in the same house as them.

Lex had never been anything but kind to Johnny and Jules adored him, it would be wrong to damn him without any real evidence of wrongdoing.

The endlessly rotating LexCorp logos reflected in his dad's eyes seemed to mock Johnny's decision.

The following Saturday found Jules and Johnny in Central City, fighting three robots that were identical to Goliath, although, thankfully, not armed with kryptonite.

Johnny even managed to get a couple of good punches in for the first time and saved a little girl from being crushed by some falling masonry. When he returned her to her mother, both the little girl and her mom kissed him on the cheek and giggled when he blushed.

They waved at him as he flew away and Johnny's heart seemed to expand hundredfold. He was starting to think he might actually enjoy the whole superheroing business after all, despite the initial setbacks.

He didn't even have to worry about Jules because Wondergirl was carrying him - something that Lex would doubtless not approve of - and he appeared to have rediscovered the aspect of his powers that had allowed him to fight the original Goliath. The effects weren't quite as spectacular as they had been that day, but he was able to do some real damage.

They were doing good things and the fight was definitely going in their favour. Johnny felt great, as if he were stronger and faster than he had ever been before.

And then Green Lantern discovered the lab.

It was set out in the back room of a completely innocuous looking florist's shop and clearly a temporary arrangement, with laptops and other equipment set out on packing boxes. There were still buckets of flowers sitting incongruously between half-assembled robots and white boards covered in hastily scribbled equations.

The air stank of orchid pollen and freshly-spilled blood.

Behind a rusty hospital screen, Green Lantern had found the bodies of nine men and women, each wearing lab coats that had once been white, their throats slashed savagely from ear to ear.

He had staggered backwards from the sight and nearly fallen over the tenth body, a man who had evidently still had the strength to crawl away from the pile of his fallen colleagues after his own throat had been cut.

Before he died, he had spelled out a name on the dusty floorboards using his own blood as ink. The shaky letters read: LEX LUTHOR.

The mood in the Titans Tower was subdued. Conversations were sporadic and listless, trailing off almost as soon as they started.

Even Bart was quiet. He curled up on one of the couches in the common room only rousing himself enough to ask: "If it really is Lex Luthor, how are we supposed to fight him anyway? No matter how many of these things we destroy, he'll always have enough money to build more."

Johnny was glad that Jules was standing far enough away that he wouldn't be able to overhear the question.

Johnny's own thoughts were so jumbled and confused that he couldn't even begin to unravel them. He didn't even know where to start. He felt restless and uncomfortable in his own skin and he needed to do something, although he wasn't sure what that might be. Normally he would have gone running or flying, getting faster and faster until the world dropped away and gave him space to think, but he couldn't leave the Tower. He didn't want to leave Jules on his own despite the fact that Jules clearly didn't want to speak to him and, in fact, appeared to be actively avoiding him.

If Johnny couldn't have the rush of air around his body to calm himself, then he would have to settle for the next best thing.

There weren't any lights on in the room that housed the swimming pool and Johnny didn't bother trying to find a switch. The moon was full and shining brightly enough through the huge full-length windows that Johnny could find the water, which was all he really needed to see.

He quickly stripped off down to his boxers and dived into the pool. He presumed that the water must be heated as there was steam rising from its surface where it met the cool night air, but hot and cold were mainly abstract concepts for him. The weight of the water on his body was relaxing in and of itself, though.

He swam laps, starting off as fast as he could go, gradually slowing as his mind emptied little by little and then refilled with nothing but the simple repetition of movement. When he began to feel the distant burn of tiredness in his muscles, he floated out of the water and settled down on the poolside, blissfully free from worries about robots and Lex Luthor.

Robin appeared from the shadows and handed him a towel, startling Johnny so badly that he almost toppled back into the pool again. Robin grinned quickly, but it was almost as cold and distant as the moonlight that bathed him.

"We need to talk about Luthor," he said.

"We do?" Johnny asked irritably as he towelled his hair. "I'd really rather not, if you don't mind. I've had enough of talking and thinking about Lex Luthor, to be honest. As a matter of fact, I'd just managed to forget all about him before you showed up."

"This is important," Robin said as he walked away to pick up Johnny's costume. "I don't think you really understand what Luthor's like. The rest of us have been doing this long enough to realise that he's not actually the sort of man that he'd like everyone to believe he is. You can't trust what you read in the papers about him. He owns all of the journalists in Metropolis."

Johnny scrambled to his feet and snatched his clothes out of Robin's hands. "Even at the Daily Planet? I don't believe that." Johnny wasn't sure what to believe about Lex, but he knew his mom would never, ever let herself be bought like that. She'd probably rather die.

Robin shrugged, his eyes quickly skimming over Johnny, head to foot, before looking towards the doorway. "I'm only telling you this so that you keep an open mind and your wits about you. Don't let him deceive you." Robin's voice dropped to a whisper and Johnny had to move closer to hear him. "I have evidence of things he's done in the past, things that no one else knows about, and I'm fairly sure that he would kill to stop them becoming public. If you...."

Robin's mouth clamped shut over his next words and he turned sharply on his heel to face the door. Jules was standing in the doorway with his head bowed, looking small and wretched in his bulky green suit.

"Superboy, I don't feel very well," Jules said without lifting his head. "Would you mind taking me home?"

Jules had the worst timing in the world and Johnny was almost irritated with him for a moment before realising that his friend was probably exhausted after using his powers so extensively during the battle. He shouldn't have just run off and left him alone for so long.

"I'll just go and get dressed," he said, knocking his shoulder against Jules' by way of an apology as he passed him.

Jules nodded listlessly in acknowledgement, his eyes not leaving the floor.

When Johnny returned to the pool, Robin and Jules appeared to be engaged in some sort of argument. It reminded him of the arguments that his dad and Lex would have if he and Jules were around: all curt hand gestures and sibilant whispers.

Robin saw Johnny first and he stepped back from Jules, frowning slightly before sinking back into the shadows so completely that it was almost as if he'd never been there at all.

Jules glared at the space where Robin had been for a moment before stomping over to join Johnny, slamming his feet down heavily with every step as if he were imagining the floor was Robin's head.

Jules seemed disinclined to speak as they walked through the Tower and Johnny thought it was probably best to let him stay silent. Their inevitable conversation about Lex could wait until there was less chance of it being overheard.

Johnny found it difficult to hold his tongue, however, and he asked, "What were you and Robin arguing about?" as soon as they got outside.

"It doesn't matter," Jules said, ignoring Johnny's outstretched arms as he reached out to pick him up in readiness for their flight. "It's really not important, especially now. I don't know why I even bothered talking to him."

"Was it about your dad?"

"No, it wasn't about my dad," Jules snapped, tugging at the bottom of his mask. "Maybe we should've talked about my dad because I'm certainly sick and tired of hearing about what a fucking terrible man he is from people who've probably never even talked to him before."

Jules ripped his mask off then, heedless of their continued proximity to the Tower. His face was bright red and wet with either sweat or tears. "That man they're talking about in there isn't my father. Isn't my dad. I know Robin's been dripping poison in your ear, but you have to believe me, Johnny, Dad could never do this."

"How do you know what Robin's been talking to me about?" Johnny asked, suddenly feeling defensive. He had no idea what to believe, but he resented Robin and Jules both for simply expecting him to take them at their word. He had told his dad that he would wait for proof and he would do. Mere words weren't going to sway him before then.

"Like it wasn't fucking obvious, with the way that both of clammed up as soon as I appeared." Jules' eyes narrowed. "Every single thought in your head was a guilty one."

"You read my thoughts?" Johnny asked in disgust, truly angry with Jules for the first time since they'd met. "I don't care what Robin and I might or might not have been talking about; you have absolutely no right to do something like that."

"God, Johnny," Jules looked mortified, his entire body slumping forward as if he were in pain. "I'd never read your thoughts. No matter what happened, I'd never do that. I just... You know that I can't help hearing things sometimes, especially if someone's really upset. I can't believe you think I'd do that to you."

"And I can't believe you think you can just shout me into submission about this, or guilt me into it," Johnny closed his eyes, not wanting to see the devastation twisting Jules' face. "I can make up my own mind, Jules, and I will."

"No one knows Dad like I do." Jules' voice was cold and sharp with determination. "Not you, not your dad, and definitely no one in the Teen Titans. He didn't do this, and I won't stand idly by and let them make him a scapegoat. I'll fight them every step of the way. You too, if it comes to that, although I hope to God it never does. You understand that, don't you?"

Johnny nodded. If it was his dad in Lex's position, he'd probably do the same thing and fight tooth and claw to clear his name. "I don't want to fall out over this, Jules."

"And we won't," Jules said, stepping forward to brush one of his small hands briefly over Johnny's temple. "Just promise me you'll keep an open mind. Whatever happens, whether my dad's innocent or if" - Jules swallowed noisily - "or if he's guilty, we'll still be friends afterwards as long as we're both careful about how we deal with this."

Johnny nodded again, more forcefully this time. His dad and Lex had been torn apart by mistrust and deception. He wouldn't let the same thing happen to Jules and him.

An anonymous tip regarding a delivery of robotics components found Johnny in Gotham on Sunday evening instead of at the movies with his mom and Auntie Chloe as he had planned.

Johnny had never liked Gotham, but it was especially unpleasant being there as Superboy. He was wary of every dark place that they passed - and there were many in the city - just in case Batman was lurking therein. Johnny wasn't scared of Batman, per se, even though he had got ominous looming down to a fine art.

He just felt on edge in the other superhero's presence, fearful of putting a foot wrong. He knew that if he did, then Batman would report it all back to Superman. He supposed that it was something that the other teen heroes had to deal with, but when your mentor was also your dad, it just made it all the more painful because then you couldn't even escape him when you went home.

"We've been looking for hours," Jules said, the voice modulator in his mask doing little to disguise the petulance in his voice. "I think it's about time we admitted that we've lost the trail."

Robin frowned. "I think that might be a little hasty. We know that the merchandise hasn't left Gotham yet. We've still got time."

Jules sighed and wandered off to kick sullenly at the side of the warehouse with his heavy, steel-toe-capped boots. Robin turned his head towards Jules for a moment, his frown darkening, before he returned to doing whatever it was that he was doing to the warehouse door.

There wasn't much that Johnny could do much to help Robin - if there wasn't a bad guy to punch, or a door to rip open, then he was pretty much superfluous - so he left him to his task and wandered over to see if he could talk to Jules.

"What's the matter, Jules?" Johnny asked as he joined his friend.

"I just feel like we're wasting our time." Jules gave the wall one last, sharp kick before sagging against it. "If you'd just let me call Dad three hours ago when I suggested it, then we'd be back home by now. He'd have found out where this stuff was in a matter of minutes. He's got lots of contacts in Gotham."

Johnny shifted uneasily. "The fewer people who know about this, the better."

"And Dad is included in that?" Jules asked incredulously. "I can't believe you actually -"

Johnny was spared from hearing about whatever it was that Jules couldn't believe by Robin calling softly for them to join him at the front of the warehouse. Johnny complied willingly and was relieved to hear Jules' heavy footfalls following him a moment later.

The question of how much Lex should know about what they did with the Teen Titans was a very loaded one and Johnny didn't want to get into another argument about it. Even now, Jules still seemed to think that they should tell his dad everything about their investigations, and he was only going along with Johnny's wishes with extreme reluctance, something which he never failed to point out. He thought that Lex would be invaluable in helping them find out who was behind the robot attacks, and Johnny agreed. He just couldn't shake the suspicion that that person might be Lex.

He also couldn't shake the suspicion that Jules had only insisted on being part of this particular mission so that he would know immediately if they found anything incriminating. Johnny knew that Lex and Jules often talked telepathically and maybe...

Johnny stamped that particular line of thought down immediately, feeling guilty for even considering it.

"It's not here, either," Robin said, before disappearing into the darkness of the alley which ran alongside the warehouse almost as completely as Batman could. Seconds later, Johnny caught sight of him swinging between the rooftops high above them.

"We should follow him, I suppose," Jules said flatly.

Johnny wrapped his arms around his friend's chest and then floated upwards until they hit clear sky. Jules didn't make any further mention of his dad as they flew, though he did twist himself into a tortuous position that looked really uncomfortable and made him very awkward to hold, which suggested to Johnny that Jules was still not very happy with him.

They continued in silence for a time as Johnny made a series of loops and quick turns to keep Robin in sight as he moved swiftly from rooftop to rooftop far below them.

"I hope Dad gets my rocket pack finished soon. It's so undignified, having to be carried everywhere by you," Jules said finally.

Johnny knew that he wasn't necessarily forgiven - Jules was simply physically incapable of staying quiet for more than ten minutes together - but the fact that he also stopped digging his elbows into Johnny's ribs was heartening. Doubtless they were starting to ache where they pressed against Johnny's invulnerable skin, but it didn't hurt to be optimistic.

"Robin seems to get around okay without flying," Johnny pointed out.

Which turned out to be entirely the wrong thing to say. Jules' elbows returned again with force, this time accompanied by the back of his head, which pressed into the hollow of Johnny's throat in a way that wasn't exactly painful, but did make it uncomfortable when he swallowed.

"As if my dad would let me go swinging around the place on the end of a rope," Jules said with a curt snort of laughter.

Johnny bit down on a comment that he was going to make about how he thought that Lex maybe had the right idea after having seen Jules' attempts to climb rope in gym class. Usually, Jules would have laughed along with him, but Johnny thought that perhaps his friend wasn't really in the mood for jokes.

Jules was always like this around Robin now - irritable and quick to take offence at the most minor things - and Johnny couldn't understand why. He seemed to have gotten over his slight case of hero worship incredibly quickly and there had been a definite tension growing in all of Jules' and Robin's interactions lately.

Johnny wondered if it had anything to do with the argument they had seemed to have in the Titans Tower. He couldn't even begin to imagine what the two of them might have to argue about.

"The Boy Wonder appears to have stopped over there," Jules said, tugging at Johnny's sleeve.

Johnny tightened his grip around Jules' waist as he descended slowly to stand next to Robin on a rooftop that seemed no different to any of the others they had passed during their flight. Jules wriggled out of Johnny's arms as soon as they landed and stomped across the roof to stand behind Robin, who was crouched beside a skylight peering down at the warehouse beneath.

"I think we've found them," Robin said, beckoning them closer.

Jules took one step forward and then stopped, the thick leather of his gloves creaking as his hands slowly clenched and unclenched at his sides. Johnny cursed himself for forgetting for a moment what had happened to Jules in Gotham almost a year before. He reached his hand out to offer Jules some comfort, but Jules stepped aside as soon as Johnny touched him.

"I'm fine, Jon," Jules snapped, before walking away stiffly to crouch beside Robin.

Johnny counted to ten in his head very slowly before he joined Robin and Jules at the skylight. This wasn't the time or the place to start an argument either and Johnny wasn't even sure what they'd be arguing about if they did.

"What are we looking at?" Johnny said, partly because it just looked like a warehouse full of boxes to him, and partly because it stopped him from saying something else he'd regret.

A couple of guards were patrolling between the rows of boxes, but there seemed nothing out of the ordinary about them either. They were wearing smart blue uniforms but no insignia that might tie them to any organisation, at least not any that Johnny could see.

"Look at the logo on the side of the boxes," Robin said, leaning closer to Johnny.

Johnny didn't want to say it, the words felt like a betrayal. "It's the LexCorp logo."

He wanted to keep his promise to Jules that he wouldn't judge Lex like everyone else before he was in possession of all the facts, but it felt more and more as though he couldn't be more convinced of his guilt unless they found a signed confession.

Jules' gloves creaked again. "That means nothing. LexCorp produces half of the robotics components used in the world today."

"I'm not so sure," Robin said, clearly unaware that he was probably in very real danger of being levitated over the side of the building by the Luthor sitting right next to him. "But the other logo is much more interesting."

Johnny tried to make something of the blocky shape below the familiar black and purple of the LexCorp logo. "It looks kinda like a monkey," he ventured.

Robin grinned. "I don't think it's a monkey, but I do -"

"It's the same symbol that was burnt onto the forehead of that poor man in Edge City," Jules said quickly before Robin had time to finish his sentence. "I recognise it from the enhanced photograph Batman made. It means that we were most likely right about the connection after all."

"What he said," Robin said, mostly without rancour, as he turned toward Jules. "Could you read the minds of the guards, get some idea of who they might be working for?"

"I don't read like to minds, as I'm sure I've mentioned on more than one occasion. It's very rude." Jules voice, on the other hand, was heavy with bitterness. "I could scan the very surface of their thoughts, though. See if that yields anything useful."

Jules went very still, barely even breathing, the way he did when he was concentrating on using his powers carefully and delicately.

Robin cocked an eyebrow at Johnny that seemed to ask the question, `What's his problem?' Johnny might have agreed with the sentiment, but he fought to keep his face impassive.

Johnny thought that Robin was perhaps becoming a friend, and that was important to him because he had so few, but Jules was his best friend and the closest thing that he had to a brother until his mom had the baby. Johnny knew where his loyalties lay. Or at least he thought he did. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with thoughts of that nature, so he pushed them aside as well.

"I can't read anything from the guards," Jules said at length, sitting back on his heels. "They're not human at all. They're robots."

Robin inhaled sharply and got to his feet in one smooth, effortless movement. "I'll go back to the Batcave and run that symbol through the computer again. There must be something we're missing."

"We'll come with you," Johnny said, scrambling upright with a great deal less grace than Robin had done.

Robin's eyes darted towards Jules. "I'm not sure how Batman would feel about that. I'll contact you if I find anything useful."

Robin was gone, running swiftly across the rooftop and then swinging into the dark night, before Johnny could say another word.

"I wanted to see the Batcave," Jules said, and although his tone was bland, Johnny knew that he was disappointed. Robin might have become tarnished in Jules' mind for whatever reason, but Batman was inviolate. That, and Jules probably wanted to sit in the Batmobile.

"I don't think he trusts us," Johnny said. "No, he doesn't trust me," Jules said, taking off his mask and running a hand through his sweaty hair, which left it sticking straight up in messy spikes. "He trusts you. He seems to like you a lot."

"But you don't like him?"

"I don't dislike him," Jules said, and he even sounded as though he might mean it, "but I don't think we'll ever be friends. There are a few important issues that we'll never see eye to eye on."

"Like what?" Johnny asked. He tried to catch Jules' eyes but the other boy stubbornly turned his head to one side. "If this is about your dad, you shouldn't take it to heart. He doesn't even know who you are. It's nothing personal."

"It's nothing to do with Dad. It's nothing you need to worry about, either. Can we just forget about it?"

Johnny didn't want to forget about it. He didn't like the way that Jules seemed to be keeping secrets from him recently. They'd always been honest with each other, but now it felt like Jules was deliberately putting distance between them. He wondered if this was how the disintegration of his dad and Lex's friendship began, this slow slide into distrust. He didn't want to lose Jules, so he bottled up all of his anxiety and choked down his anger.

"Yeah, okay then," Johnny said, letting Jules stay silent again. He could only hope that Jules would open up to him soon in case the weight of everything they left unsaid crushed them both.

"Good," Jules said, with a brightness that was patently false. "If you'd kept on bugging me, I'm afraid that I would have had to ask Dad to have you thrown out of the house."

Johnny let himself get caught up in their usual teasing with little resistance. It was easier that way. "I don't think my dad would be too happy about that."

"Oh, I'd have him thrown out too." Jules' broad smile was pure relief. "'Though I'd have to keep your grandmother, I'm afraid. She makes the best muffins, and she likes me more than you anyway. It would break her heart if she had to leave me."

Johnny rolled his eyes and offered Jules a hand to stand up. Jules took it without hesitation and tried to pull Johnny off balance as he heaved himself upright.

"You're incorrigible," Johnny said, chuckling.

"And I'm surprised that you know such big words, Kent." Jules gave Johnny a devilish grin which faded quickly. "Seriously, Johnny, I've got a few things on my mind at the moment that I need to sort through that have nothing to do with Dad. I'm just not ready to talk about them yet, but I will tell you when I am. You have to trust me."

Jules had given him the same space when Johnny had first found out about his mom's pregnancy and Johnny felt it was only fair that he did the same for his friend now. It might have been fair but, unfortunately, that didn't mean that it also felt right.

"I do trust you," Johnny said. It was easy to say with Jules clear green eyes only inches from his. It was getting harder and harder to believe it, though.

"Johnny, would you mind coming in here, please?" Lex asked, beckoning Johnny into the study.

Johnny hesitated at the room's threshold, guilt and no little fear making him unwilling to enter. He'd skipped gym class that afternoon to check on Lex at work. It had been one of the most boring hours of his life: floating outside Lex's office window, watching him read over a huge pile of reports. Lex had looked up only once to thank his PA for bringing him a cup of coffee, but Johnny was convinced that Lex must have spotted him somehow.

Lately, Johnny had found himself... He hesitated to call it spying on Lex. He preferred to think that he was on a fact-finding mission so that he could gather evidence in order to make the informed decision that he'd promised his dad and Jules that he'd make.

His investigations had failed to turn up anything even remotely incriminating, however.

Johnny had explored the entire mansion and found it disappointingly lacking in secret passageways leading to huge underground labs full of illegal experiments. He'd watched every move that Lex made in the evenings and at the weekend and noted them down in a log book that he'd made especially for that purpose. The entries were depressingly repetitive, consisting mainly of `watched TV with Jules', `helped Grandma with cooking', and `had early night with Dad'.

"Please," Lex repeated, closing his laptop and pushing it away. "It's important."

Johnny gingerly stepped inside the room, but didn't close the door behind him just in case he needed to make a quick getaway. "What is it?"

Lex leaned back in his chair, the leather sighing beneath him. He licked his lips, but said nothing.

Johnny met Lex's eyes as steadily as he dared as his mind raced, desperately trying to come up with some sort of rational explanation as to why he had been hanging around the twenty-fifth floor of LexCorp when he should have been in school. It was surprisingly difficult to think of any at all.

He was screwed.

Lex broke eye contact first, looking out of the window as he asked, "Have you and Jules had some sort of falling out?"

It was a less awkward question than the one that Johnny had been expecting, but not much less. "No, not really," he said.

It wasn't exactly a lie. They hadn't fallen out as such, but they hadn't been spending as much time together as they used to. There were just too many topics of conversation that Johnny felt were out of bounds that he didn't feel as comfortable in Jules' company anymore. He was fairly certain that Jules felt the same way.

"That's just what Jules told me," Lex said with a sigh. "I can understand that it must be... difficult for you, Johnny, with everything that's happening at the moment. What they're saying in the Daily Planet and on the news.

"I can't ask you to believe me if I tell you that I don't have anything to do with any of it. We don't know each other well enough to expect that level of trust, but if there's anything that you want to know, anything you're unsure of that you think I could explain to you, please don't hesitate to ask."

There were so many things he could ask that Johnny didn't know where to start. He also had no way of knowing whether anything that Lex might tell him was true or not, anyway.

"Okay, Lex," he said anyway, hoping to cut the conversation short. No matter how uncomfortable he felt around Jules these days, it just didn't compare to the way Lex made him feel.

Lex got up from his chair slowly, and turned around even around even more slowly. He seemed to look straight though Johnny as though he was as insubstantial as mist.

"Although I'm loath to admit it," he said quietly, "I know Jules doesn't have many friends. He must be finding this difficult as well, but whenever I bring it up, he simply shrugs it off. I think you're the only person he can really talk to besides me."

Johnny felt slightly sick and suddenly couldn't bear to look at Lex's pale, concerned face. That's what hurt more than anything else. Johnny knew that he clung to Jules more than he should - he'd often wondered if he was crowding the other boy, even though Jules never complained - but Jules clung back just as hard. Jules got along well with people, certainly much better than Johnny did, but he never let them get close to him. Johnny didn't know if it was a consequence of the secrets Jules had to keep or simply a part of his personality, but he did know that Jules would have been just as lonely as Johnny had been these past few weeks.

It hurt that he might be upsetting Jules, but Johnny couldn't just pretend that there weren't any problems between them. He was pretty sure that Jules wouldn't talk to him any more than he'd talk to Lex, anyway. They'd said all that there was to say on the subject without the conversation descending into a fistfight and it was better to keep their distance from each other to make sure it never came to that.

Johnny was aware that Lex was patiently waiting for reassurance, but he couldn't think of a single thing to say. He affected deep interest in the leather-bound books on the dark oak bookshelf by the window, the photograph of his dad and Lex on the desk, the laptop: anything to avoid looking at Lex.

Something about the laptop held his attention. Its fan was whirring noisily as if it were completing some complicated command. Lex hadn't turned it off, but he had closed it before Johnny came into the study. It might be that he was working on private LexCorp business, but perhaps... Johnny hadn't checked the laptop, perhaps there was something on it that Lex didn't want him to see.

"Johnny?" A little exasperation had crept into Lex's voice.

"Yeah," Johnny said distractedly. "I'll talk to him, Lex."

"Thank you," Lex stepped forward and brushed the tips of his fingers across Johnny's shoulder. Johnny had to force himself to stay still and not move away from the contact. "I should let you get back to whatever it was you were doing."

It was clearly a dismissal and Lex reinforced it by returning to his seat and resting his hands on top of the laptop. He didn't open it, but he did start drumming his fingers against the case, obviously eager for Johnny to leave so that he could get back to work.

It was fairly damning evidence as far as Johnny was concerned. He needed to see what was on that computer.

It was difficult to sneak around if your dad was Superman, but not impossible. Johnny had had sixteen years to learn exactly when the best time for dodging his dad's super-hearing was, and three in the morning seemed to be it. The hour when his dad finally relaxed and let deep sleep take him.

Nevertheless, Johnny was careful to avoid the floorboards that he knew were loose and the stairs that creaked as he made his way to Lex's study. He was honestly surprised by just how easy it was; almost suspiciously so. He didn't even catch a glimpse of Hope or Mercy, who he knew prowled around at night, no doubt hoping for the chance to seriously injure any intruder who was stupid enough to try and break in.

Johnny's uneasiness increased as he saw that the laptop was sitting in the middle of the desk in exactly the same position as when Lex had been working on it earlier that day. He was fairly certain that Lex usually locked the laptop in his safe before he went to bed.

Despite his uneasiness, Johnny still booted up the machine. Maybe Lex wanted to trap him somehow, or maybe he had simply been forgetful for once. Either way, Johnny was more convinced than ever that the laptop was important.

Its wallpaper was the same image as the screensaver on the monitors that they'd found in Keystone City, although the LexCorp logo was static. It made Johnny's back tingle as though someone were running a finger along the length of his spine. He shook his head, feeling a little ridiculous. There was nothing inherently suspicious about Lex having that particular image as his wallpaper; in fact it would have been stranger if he didn't.

Johnny flicked through the contents of all the folders that he could find. They all contained nothing more than incomprehensible spreadsheets full of densely packed numbers and LexCorp documentation that Johnny was fairly certain was already in the public domain. Johnny was beginning to feel disheartened until he clicked on a folder marked `m_bird' and a window popped up asking him to enter a password.

Johnny grinned victoriously. He'd been right. There was something on the laptop that Lex didn't want other people to read, possibly not even Jules, because he was the only other person who ever used the computer, and why protect it with a password otherwise?

Johnny had seen enough movies to know what sort of things people set as their passwords. He tried Jules' full name first. The laptop beeped and rejected that attempt. Johnny then tried Jules' birth date with the same result. He frowned in annoyance. Obviously, Lex had seen all the same movies that Johnny had and he'd learnt from them.

This might take a long time.

Johnny was about ready to throw the smugly beeping laptop out of the window. He'd tried everybody's name and birthday that he could think of, the name of every philosopher and emperor that he knew, and even every single character from `Warrior Angel', right back to issue one. Typing at super-speed helped the process along a little, but it did nothing to help Johnny's brain work any faster.

In desperation, he looked at every single piece of paper scattered across the desk in the vain, foolish hope that Lex was absentminded enough to have written the password somewhere.

He knocked over the photograph of his dad and Lex as he pulled a stack of glossy brochures out from underneath it, and studied it carefully as he righted it. It had been taken back when they both lived in Smallville and were still friends. Johnny found himself transfixed by the picture, amazed at how little the passage of time had changed the faces of the two men grinning back at him from twenty-odd years in the past. If his dad wasn't wearing a plaid shirt in the photograph, Johnny would have guessed that it had been taken only the day before.

The photograph was crisscrossed by deep creases as if someone had crumpled it up to throw it away but hadn't quite been able to bring themselves to do so. Johnny didn't know whether that person had been his dad or Lex, as they both seemed to love and hate that time of their lives in equal measures. It was important to both of them, no matter how deeply they tried to bury it.

Inspired by that thought, Johnny moved back to the laptop and typed `loeb_bridge' into the password box. The laptop beeped. Undeterred, he tried `loeb_bridge2001'.

The computer seemed to think about this, humming loudly for a moment, before the folder finally opened.

Johnny restricted his victory celebrations to a quick spin on the chair, choking down the cheer that felt like the more appropriate response. He didn't want to get caught now. Not in his moment of triumph.

The folder contained two files: one named `Olympus' and the other `Hades'. Johnny rolled his eyes as he clicked on `Olympus'; there was seemingly nothing that Lex couldn't turn into a lesson in Greek mythology, even unknowingly.

His stomach seemed to drop down to somewhere near his knees when he saw what was on the file: a neatly tabulated list of all the members of the JLA, JSA, Outsiders and other groups that Johnny had never even heard of, each one linking to a separate section listing each superhero's powers and known associates. And their weaknesses.

Why the hell would Lex need something like this?

"What are you doing?" a low voice asked, shaky with anger.

For a moment, Johnny thought that it must be Lex, and he swivelled around quickly, ready to stammer out apologies and explanations that already sounded pathetic in his head.

They died on his lips. It was Jules.

It was Jules was standing in the doorway, his hair mussed and eyes bleary from sleep, his face an angry red that clashed horribly with his hair. He looked almost dangerous - with his fists clenched at his sides and his mouth twisted into a snarl - despite the fact he was wearing his Batman pyjamas, the ones that he'd had since he was eleven and that Lex had been trying to dispose of in secret for years.

"I'm," Johnny started, but he realised that he had no idea how to finish the sentence.

There was nothing that he could say that didn't sound like, `I was spying on your dad and it turns out that I was right to do so,' because, well, that was the truth.

"How dare you," Jules said, striding into the room and slamming the laptop closed, only narrowly missing catching Johnny's fingers. "Those are my dad's private files you're looking at. What gives you the right to go poking around his things?"

"How dare I?" Johnny asked incredulously. How could Jules be so stupid? So naive? "It may have escaped your notice, but there's every chance that your dad might be caught up in something really serious here, Jules. Lots of people have died already, and who knows how many more are going to in the future if we don't catch whoever's responsible. You might be willing to blindly trust your dad, but I'm not. All the signs point to the fact that -"

Jules laughed mockingly. "`All the signs'," he echoed, shaking his head. "God, just listen to yourself, Johnny. What signs are they? LexCorp logos and 'Lex Luthor' written in a dying man's blood? They couldn't be more blatant `signs' if they tried, could they? Do you honestly think Dad would be that sloppy if he was involved in this? Someone's trying to frame him, and they're not being subtle about it. I can't believe that anyone's falling for it, especially not you."

Jules had a point, it did seem very scripted, but: "How do explain these files on your dad's computer then? What good reason could he possibly have for keeping files detailing ways to defeat the Justice League?"

"Because he helps them," Jules said, backing away from the desk a little. "Because he sends them information and he needs to know if anyone's planning to use those weaknesses against them. He uses the codename Mockingbird, as I'm sure he would have told you if you'd asked. Hell, even your dad could have told you about it if you'd actually bothered to be upfront instead of testing out your espionage skills. Which are very poor, in case you were wondering."

It made sense, given the name of the folder, but Johnny still couldn't shake the niggling itch of a doubt at the back of his mind. Robin had told him that Lex was bad news, and what reason would he have to lie about that? "It could be a double bluff," Johnny persisted, "making it seem like such an obvious setup."

Jules dismissed Johnny's words with a violent arcing movement of his hand. "I've had enough of this," he said, walking towards the door. "I've gone along with what you wanted, but this is too far. I'm not going to let you snoop around behind Dad's back and spread unfounded rumours about him."

"Where are you going?" Johnny asked, rising from the chair.

"I'm going to tell him exactly what's been going on. He's got a right to know."

Johnny grabbed Jules' shoulder before the other boy had chance to take another step. He couldn't let Jules tell Lex what he'd been doing. Not only would that tip him off, make him more careful, if he was the one behind the robot attacks, but Johnny's dad couldn't know about this. He'd promised that he'd be patient and level-headed. He'd promised that he'd give Lex the benefit of the doubt, the way no one else seemed willing to do.

Adrenaline and fear always made Johnny unable to judge his own strength, and Jules yelped in pain. "Let go of me," he said, trying to twist his body away.

Johnny was paralysed by shock. He was hurting Jules, but he couldn't seem to loosen his hold. His fingers actually appeared to tighten, gripping Jules harder and anchoring him in place.

"Get your fucking hand off me," Jules growled.

The paintings on the walls started to shake on their hooks, chains rattling and frames banging against the oak panelling. The mirror above the fireplace broke with a sharp noise like a gunshot, thin cracks as fine as a hair radiating out across its surface and splitting Johnny's reflection into hundreds of pieces.

The air around Johnny seemed to thicken and a heavy pressure built up inside his head, pressing painfully against the back of his eyeballs. He grabbed at his head with both hands in a desperate attempt to keep them inside his skull.

Jules dropped as soon as Johnny let go of him, and Johnny could hear him crawling across the floor with surprising speed before collapsing against a wall, as far away from Johnny as he could get without leaving the study.

"I'm sorry, Johnny," Jules said and the pressure dropped just as suddenly as it had risen, leaving Johnny's head feeling blessedly light once again. "I forget how strong I am sometimes, just as you appear to do."

Johnny blinked rapidly until he stopped seeing dark blotches in front of his eyes. Jules was rubbing at his shoulder and was breathing as heavily as a thoroughbred that had just finished a Cup race. His expression was completely blank.

Johnny's heart felt as if it might break. He'd been right all along. He was a monster and he shouldn't be allowed around normal people in case he hurt them. He'd hurt Jules.

He fell to his knees and reached a hand out towards Jules, meaning to offer him some comfort, some sort of apology. Jules flattened himself against the wall behind him, shying away from Johnny's touch.

Johnny thought his heart did break then, if a breaking heart made your chest feel as though it had been hollowed out and was ready to collapse in on itself. As though you might start crying and never, ever be able to stop.

"You might be right," Jules said, struggling to his feet. "Maybe it isn't the best idea to tell my dad about what you've been doing. We all have to live together after all, and I doubt he'd be very happy with you. I'd ask you to promise not to do anything like this again, but I don't think that I trust you enough to accept you at your word anymore."

Johnny wanted to put this right, wanted to say something that would make Jules smile as he usually did and forgive him, but, as ever, he couldn't find the words. His tongue felt like nothing more than a useless lump of wood that cleaved to the roof of his mouth and filled it with splinters.

He could only watch mutely as Jules paused in the doorway and said, "I think I'm going to have to tender my resignation from the Teen Titans. I can't say as I completely agree with their methods, no matter how noble their goals. And, to further the equally noble goal of a harmonious home-life, I suggest that you stay far away from me when we're not in school. I don't think I can bear to speak to you right now."

Johnny leant his back against a gargoyle and contemplated the vast open arc of the darkening sky above him. He didn't know why he'd chosen Gotham, of all places, but he'd needed to get far away from the house and it had seemed as good a place as any at the time.

Its dark, oppressive towers seemed to fit his mood better than the brightly-lit streets of Metropolis anyway. This high up, the air was nearly silent; the distant sounds of the city nothing more than a muted throb like the heartbeat of some enormous beast. It was almost peaceful, unlike the silence at home, and Johnny could feel some of the tension that had knotted his muscles all week start to slip away.

"I thought you didn't like Gotham?" The voice wasn't exactly unexpected - Johnny had discovered that it was almost impossible for him to do anything without it getting around on the superhero grapevine - but he was glad that it was Robin's and not Batman's. Batman was likely to go tattling to Johnny's dad, but Robin might just let him be.

"I don't," Johnny said, not turning around to acknowledge Robin's presence in the hope that Robin would get the message that he didn't want company.

Robin clearly wasn't as perceptive as Johnny had thought, because he padded over quietly to crouch beside Johnny. "So what are you doing here? The city's very quiet for once. That might be a little suspicious in and of itself, I suppose, but it's really nothing to worry about."

Johnny opened his mouth tell Robin that he just wanted to be left alone, but his vocal chords turned traitor. "I needed to get away from my family for a while."

He didn't know why he'd said it, but it seemed as though the words had been hiding just behind his lips, awaiting their chance of escape and it felt liberating to give them voice. Robin probably wasn't the best person to hear them, but it wasn't as if Johnny had many other options anyway.

Robin stood up and Johnny thought that he was going to leave, but he simply resettled himself into a more comfortable-looking position, crossing his long legs and pulling his cape tightly around his body. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Johnny half-shook his head before realising that he did. "Are you sure that you don't have more important things to do? It could take a while."

Robin nodded. "As I said, it's quiet tonight and I was just patrolling. I've got as long as you need."

It took a moment for Johnny to collect his thoughts and decide how best to phrase things so that he didn't give too many details about his home life. Robin waited patiently, his steady breaths hanging as white fog in the air. Johnny guessed that the night must be bitter, but Robin wasn't shivering. Johnny moved closer to him, just in case, as he doubted Robin would say anything even if he was cold.

"I've fallen out with my stepbrother," Johnny said finally. Jules was right; it did seem weird to think of him like that. "It's just made things uncomfortable at home right now. We were really good friends and now he acts like he doesn't know me at all."

That didn't even come close to describing how bad things were between them, but Johnny couldn't even begin to verbalise exactly why it hurt so much that Jules was being... polite to him.

Johnny had expected Jules to be angry after their fight and he had braced himself for arguments and cutting insults. Jules was nothing less than perfectly civil, however, and somehow that hurt more than Johnny had thought it ever could. Their interactions had become nothing more than tentative greetings if their paths happened to cross in the house and courteous requests for the salt or the butter dish at the dinner table.

It was as if they'd never been anything more than chance acquaintances and if their recent distance affected Jules at all, he gave no sign of it. Johnny had no idea how to make things better and Jules offered no help at all, meeting all Johnny's attempts at conversation with blank indifference and eyes that seemed to lack even a spark of recognition.

"I can't talk to my dad about it, even though he keeps asking, because the reason we fell out... Well, it's sort of a secret. We promised not to tell anyone about it. It doesn't stop him asking about it. Incessantly. I'm not sure how long I can keep making excuses about it, because my dad and I had a lot of trouble recently with not talking to each other and he's starting to worry that I just don't want to talk to him. But it's not that, it's...." Johnny shook his head in frustration. This wasn't helping at all. It was just as confusing saying it out loud as it was in his head.

"What about your stepmother?" Robin asked softly. "Can you talk to her?"

Johnny almost laughed at the image of Lex as his stepmother, but the urge to do so passed quickly. "God, no. She... She's the reason that I fell out with my stepbrother. I think she's messed up in something bad, but my stepbrother worships her. I think she could murder someone right in front of him and he still wouldn't hear a word said against her."

"And your mom? Is she still around?"

"Yeah, she's still around, but she's expecting a baby and I don't want to bother her right now."

Johnny had actually tried moving in with his mom and Richard when things at Lex's became unbearable, but he'd only managed two nights. They'd already started converting the room he usually stayed in into a nursery and the air was thick and cloying with the stink of fresh paint. Johnny had stayed awake both nights, staring into the smooth, glittering eyes of the giant teddy bear that now stood sentinel over the narrow bed, coming to the slow realisation that he wasn't looking forward to the baby being born at all.

He didn't get to spend enough time with his mom as it was and he didn't want to share her with anyone else, especially not a baby who would grow up to be the normal child that his mom and dad had always hoped he would be. He felt selfish and immature for thinking that way, but that didn't help make the feelings disappear. Things at Lex's were unpleasant, but at least he'd grown used to them, which lessened their pain to some extent.

Once he returned home, he'd wanted to tell Jules that he'd finally figured out how he felt about his new brother or sister. He'd gotten as far as knocking on Jules' closed bedroom door before remembering that he couldn't talk to Jules about anything important anymore. Somehow remembering that had made the pain as fresh as it had been on the morning after their argument when he'd first realised that Jules had really meant what he'd said.

"Isn't there anyone you can talk to at all?" Robin asked.

"No." Johnny shook his head, almost unwilling to admit it. The only other people he ever really talked to were his grandma and Auntie Chloe, and he couldn't tell them about what was happening for the same reasons he couldn't tell his dad. "I don't... I don't really have any other friends."

"What about Morpheus?" Robin's voice held the same note of irritation that was always evident in Jules' when he talked about Robin.

Johnny was honestly confused for a moment before he remembered he'd told Robin that he and Morpheus were best friends and that Robin had no way of knowing that Morpheus and the imaginary stepbrother were in fact the same person.

"I don't really see him very often, except at school. We're not that close. We're best friends, but when someone's the best out of one, it doesn't really mean that much."

"I see," Robin said, sounding a lot happier at that revelation.

He placed his gloved hand lightly on Johnny's knee and Johnny moved into the contact out of habit. Jules always used to touch him a lot, whether it was offering comfort or reassurance, or just to draw his attention to something. Johnny hadn't noticed it until he didn't have it anymore, and now he missed it. Just as he missed the way that Jules could always make him laugh, the way he knew how to cheer him up after a bad day at school, hell, he even missed the way that Jules seemed incapable of watching a movie or playing a video game without keeping up a constant commentary on the action - something that had driven Johnny to sit on Jules' chest and attempt to smother him with a cushion on a number of occasions in the past.

Johnny covered Robin's hand with his own without thinking about it, because it was what he would have done if it was Jules sitting next to him. Robin recoiled slightly as if shocked, but he soon resettled himself, moving even closer so that his side was almost flush against Johnny's.

"Thanks for this, Robin," Johnny said, squeezing Robin's fingers gratefully. "It's all been building up for a long time."

"Any time," Robin said with a quick smile. "Though I don't really see how I've done anything to help."

"It helps just to be able to be able to talk, and to have someone listen. I've been kinda... lonely recently." Johnny sighed, ashamed of his own admission. He definitely hadn't meant to say that. If Robin didn't already think he was some sort of pathetic loser, he certainly would now.

Robin was silent for a long time and Johnny thought that he must be trying to decide on a way of extricating himself from Johnny's company as quickly and politely as possible. Johnny was just about to offer an apology and leave before Robin had to, when he was startled by Robin's hand touching his face.

Robin's eyes widened behind his mask as Johnny turned to look at him and he swept his thumb shakily across Johnny's cheekbone. His bottom lip was caught between his teeth, as if he were struggling with some sort of decision. At length he asked, "Can I...?" but his voice faded away to nothing before he finished the question.

Johnny had no idea what Robin might be asking him for, but he nodded anyway. Robin had been good enough to sit and listen to Johnny whining, so if he wanted some sort of favour in return, then Johnny was more than happy to oblige as it wasn't as if Robin was likely to ask him to do anything unpleasant or illegal. He'd probably just want Johnny's help with a case, or some company as he continued his patrol, or....

The kiss was brief and Johnny barely had chance to notice that it was happening before it was over. It was nothing more than a light press of lips and the barest flicker of Robin's tongue against Johnny's own as Johnny opened his mouth in surprise.

Robin was blushing as he pulled back but his fingers curled around Johnny's jaw gently, holding him in place. He watched Johnny's face avidly, barely even blinking, as he waited for Johnny to do... something.

But Johnny wasn't quite sure what he should do. He'd never been kissed before and he wasn't entirely sure what the correct etiquette was in such circumstances. Part of him wanted to kiss Robin back, but he was fairly certain that was also the part of him that was grateful to Robin for being there and being a good friend. It wouldn't be fair on Robin to do that, not if he liked Johnny enough to kiss him and obviously wanted to do it again.

Johnny had just never thought of Robin that way - he'd never thought of anyone that way - but he didn't know how to tell him that without seeming dismissive or rude. So he didn't say or do anything, just stared wordlessly and helplessly at Robin until the flush faded from Robin's cheeks and he pulled his hands away and folded them carefully in his lap.

"I'm sorry, Robin," Johnny said quietly. Robin looked so disheartened that Johnny almost wished that he had kissed him back, no matter how stupid that decision might have proved to be in the long run.

"I should have known that you..." Robin shook his head and smiled self-deprecatingly. "It doesn't matter. I'm sorry if I embarrassed you."

"It's okay," Johnny said. "You didn't embarrass me."

He was worried that this might make things awkward between Robin and him, or that Robin might not want to be friends anymore, but he wasn't embarrassed. Maybe that would come later.

Robin nodded slightly, but he didn't look entirely confident in his agreement. He pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his chin on his knees, staring out into the night mutely.

Johnny guessed that Robin probably wouldn't want him hanging around, but when he got up to leave Robin caught at his sleeve. "Don't go. I've discovered some new information about the robots and I'd like the chance to work through it with you."

Johnny grinned and allowed Robin to pull him back down again. This would only be awkward if they let it become so and it seemed that Robin wasn't willing to let that happen, even though it must be difficult for him. Johnny was extremely grateful to him for that kindness. He didn't think he could bear to lose both of his friends.

Johnny inspected the frankly uninspiring group of boys crowding the school cafeteria and despaired of ever figuring out exactly who he was attracted to.

Johnny had never given the topic much thought before, something which he'd often considered was strange in and of itself, given how much of his peers' time and energy that particular topic seemed to occupy. His adolescence had just been fraught with other, more pressing, concerns from almost the moment he hit puberty.

But that had changed since Robin kissed him. Now there was little else that Johnny thought about, which admittedly made a refreshing - if not entirely pleasant - change from worrying about Luthors.

Johnny was aware that he could be a little... dense about some things, and he wasn't particularly inclined towards introspection, but he was fairly certain that even he should have figured out by the age of sixteen whether he was straight or not. Or at least had an inkling either way.

He'd borrowed some porn from Jules' worryingly large stash several months before in the hope that he'd finally discover that spark of something that he was certain that the other boys his age felt. When it didn't come, he'd put it down to some strange anomaly of Kryptonian biology and moved on - save for that one humiliating conversation with his dad that he wasn't willing to repeat in a hurry - but now he wasn't so sure.

Johnny didn't think that he'd done anything to lead Robin on, anything that would suggest that he was interested, but Robin had still had the courage to kiss him. Most guys that Johnny knew would have punched him for that, but Robin hadn't seemed worried about that possibility. He must have thought that Johnny would, if not welcome the kiss, at least tolerate it.

And Johnny had tolerated it. He still couldn't say that he'd particularly enjoyed it, but that could have been the person who kissed him. What had happened in Gotham hadn't made him embarrassed, as Robin had feared that it might, but he had no desire to do it again.

But Johnny wasn't willing to dismiss the possibility that the reason for his continued lack of interest in girls was perhaps because he wasn't interested in girls. He'd approached school on Monday morning with an open mind, reasoning that an all-boys' school with over four hundred pupils was a good place to start trying to figure out if he was really interested in men or not.

He'd tried, he really had, but either there wasn't a single good-looking guy who went to Centennial Park, or he wasn't in the least bit gay. The thought of touching, much less kissing, any of them turned his stomach. Admittedly, his opinion of his classmates had probably been adversely influenced by the fact that almost all of them were unrepentant assholes who had made it very clear that they considered Johnny unworthy of breathing the same air as them.

He wasn't ready to admit defeat quite yet, however. He probably just needed to increase his sample size.

Johnny found himself lingering in the locker room after gym class, long after most of the other boys had left for home. He did feel a little skeevy for basically using the excuse to see whether he found the male form any more inspiring than the female, but he reminded himself that it was in the name of science. Xenobiology in particular.

He sat down on a bench and lingered over getting changed. He kept one eye on Elijah Edwards and his pair of moronic sycophants, who had long since finished getting dressed but were still fooling around with something in Edward's locker. They were snickering and kept looking around nervously, so it was obviously something Mr. Henderson wouldn't be happy to catch them with, but Johnny didn't much care what it was. He was far too busy examining Edwards' ass.

Jules had rhapsodised over Starfire's ass for days after they joined the Teen Titans, but Johnny hadn't seen anything particularly exciting about it. It was an ass; it connected her legs to her body and meant that she had something comfortable to sit on when she needed to. Much the same as Edwards' was. Maybe Edwards just didn't have a particularly nice ass, but Johnny didn't think he was in any way qualified to judge whether or not that was the case.

He shifted his attention to Felix Carmichael. Carmichael was broad and well-muscled in comparison to his companions, but Johnny found that didn't arouse any feelings in him other than mild admiration for his dedication to what was obviously a strenuous work out regime. He still had a face like a troll.

Edward's glanced around once more as he pulled a magazine out of his locker and Johnny wasn't quick enough in looking away. Their eyes met and Edwards scowled.

"What the hell are you looking at, Kent?" he snarled.

"Nothing," Johnny said. He could feel the flush creeping up his neck and along his chest and he pulled his shirt on quickly in the hopes that the other boys wouldn't notice.

"He was looking at your ass," Graham Turner said with a smirk.

"No, I wasn't!" Johnny grabbed his pants and stood up from the bench. "I was -"

Edwards didn't wait to hear Johnny's excuses. He stalked towards Johnny purposefully, Carmichael and Turner falling in behind him.

Johnny was going to die. He might well be invulnerable, but they'd find a way to do it somehow.

He backed away from the three boys until his back hit a wall. Edwards grinned unpleasantly and then surged forward, his fists striking the wall on either side of Johnny's head.

"Were you checking out my ass, Kent?" Edwards asked, leaning in so closely that his sour-smelling breath ruffled Johnny's bangs.

Johnny couldn't find the breath to reply; his lungs felt like they'd shrunk to the size of a penny and he could only gasp and splutter as Edwards grin became sharper. Johnny didn't know how he was going to get out of this without inadvertently hurting Edwards, but he couldn't let Edwards hit him like his glittering hazel eyes were promising he was going to. There was no way that this could end well; no way that Johnny could get himself out of this situation without it being obvious that he wasn't exactly human.

"You're a dirty fag, aren't you?" Edwards grabbed a handful of Johnny's hair and yanked his head backwards. "Just like your father."

"What was that, Edwards?" someone asked, but it wasn't Carmichael or Turner. Johnny recognised the voice instantly, but didn't know whether he should be happy to hear it or not.

He'd forgotten that Jules would be there. He always hung back after gym class so that he could use the showers after everyone else. His last name protected him from most of the usual petty unpleasantness of high school life, but he was chubby and a redhead and that had made him just too tempting a target on several occasions.

Edwards was either too distracted or too stupid to notice that it wasn't either one of his friends that had asked the question. "I said that he's a dirty fag, just like his daddy," he repeated with venom, ignoring Turner and Carmichael's hissed entreaties for him to shut the hell up. "A disgusting fucking pervert."

"What does that make my dad then, Edwards?" Jules asked, his voice level and composed.

Edwards face blanched of all colour and he spun around quickly, knuckles grazing Johnny's cheeks. "I didn't mean..."

"Is Lex Luthor a dirty fag, as well?" Jules asked as calmly as if he was inquiring about the weather. "Do you think he's a pervert?"

"God, no," Edwards said, cowering a little as Jules walked towards him.

"Really?" Jules brow furrowed as if he were confused by Edwards' words. "If Mr. Kent is, then surely my dad is as well?"

Edwards shook his head violently. "I didn't mean... Please don't tell him that I said that," he whined.

Jules cocked his head to one side. "Your father's still waiting to hear whether the tender he submitted to LexCorp was successful, isn't he? And I believe Carmichael's mother is currently negotiating with my dad to try and secure financing for her latest vanity project." Jules smiled thinly. "I know that the only reason Turner could stay on here after his father left was his LexCorp scholarship."

Johnny stared at Jules over the top of Edward's bowed head and almost didn't recognise him. He was still dressed in his gym kit and he was a good five or six inches shorter than any of the other boys, but his was still the most commanding presence in the room. Johnny had never seen the resemblance between Lex and Jules before, but he saw it now in the small, knowing smirk twisting Jules' lips and the arrogant set of his shoulders. He could imagine it was exactly how Lex looked as he stood in his boardroom and oversaw LexCorp's destruction of a rival company.

"You wouldn't dare." Edwards said, but his tone lacked conviction. He sounded scared and Johnny couldn't find it within himself to feel sorry for that, even though he knew that he should.

"I wouldn't dare what?" Jules sounded puzzled again. "I don't believe that I've made any threats towards you. I was just merely stating the facts as I see them."

"Come on, Elijah," Turner said anxiously. "You don't want to fuck with the Luthors."

Edwards' next words were rough and sounded as if they were being forcibly ripped from his throat. "What do you want me to do, Luthor?"

"I don't want you to do anything, Edwards." Jules crossed his arms over his chest and nodded towards Johnny. "Although apologising to Johnny for insulting his father would probably be the polite thing to do."

Edwards' back stiffened and for a moment Johnny thought that he was going to refuse, but he finally said: "I'm sorry, Kent," in a barely intelligible rush.

"Thank you," Johnny said.

It was tempting to make Edwards squirm a little more, but he had the tendency to turn nasty when someone embarrassed him and was remarkably patient when it came to revenge. No matter how tempting it might be, Johnny was going to be stuck going to school with Edwards for two more years and Jules couldn't be there every minute of every day to bail him out of trouble.

Carmichael and Turner mumbled their apologies and grabbed their books and blazers before beating a hasty retreat. Edwards took his time getting ready, however. He sauntered over to his locker and slowly gathered his belongings, clearly trying to prove that his confrontation with Jules hadn't ruffled him at all.

As he left, Edwards smiled obsequiously at Jules and then patted him roughly on the shoulder. "It wasn't anything personal, Luthor."

One of Jules' eyebrows rose slightly in acknowledgment of Edwards' words, but his expression was otherwise completely impassive. Edwards looked a little nervous for a moment, but it soon passed. He shook himself once and seemed to shed all of his uncertainty and apprehension like a dog would shake water from its coat. When he walked out of the locker room, it was with his usual confident swagger.

Jules posture remained ramrod straight until the door slammed closed behind Edwards, and then he seemed to collapse in on himself. He sat down heavily on a bench and covered his face with his hands, twisting his hair almost viciously around his fingers. "I don't think they'll be bothering you again," he said, his voice thick as though he was on the verge of tears.

Johnny wasn't sure what he should do. He knew that Jules wouldn't welcome any sort of physical contact any more than he'd welcome an attempt at conversation. But Johnny couldn't just walk away without trying to comfort Jules somehow when he was so obviously upset. No matter how tattered their friendship might have become recently, Jules was still one of the most important people in Johnny's life and Johnny couldn't stand to see him in pain.

He settled on sitting next to Jules, careful to keep enough distance between them that Jules wouldn't feel crowded and could still ignore Johnny if he wanted to.

"I hate doing that." Jules sniffed and scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles before dropping his hands so that they hung loosely between his knees. "I hate using my dad's name like a weapon. It's not fair on him and it's fucking cowardly."

"Thanks, Jules," Johnny said quietly. He should be feeling guilty, but his overwhelming feeling was that of relief. Jules was talking to him and he obviously still cared enough that he was willing to hurt himself to keep Johnny safe.

"I couldn't let Edwards hit you." The corners of Jules' mouth quirked upwards into something approximating a smile. "The guy's an asshole, and as entertaining as it might have been to see him break his hand on your face, I'm sure that it would have led to a lot of questions that you wouldn't be able answer."

Okay, so Jules had been acting to protect Johnny's secret, but as Edwards and his friends couldn't actually physically injure Johnny, it amounted to the same thing.

"I didn't think that you'd do something like that to help me," Johnny said. "Not now."

Jules' tentative smile disappeared and he took a deep breath as if he was going to say something in reply, but then he only exhaled it slowly and remained silent. Johnny watched him carefully, desperately looking for some sort of sign as to what he could say or do to ease the inflexible line of Jules' back and make him smile again.

Johnny had never really studied Jules this closely before; partly because he was so used to seeing him that he never really saw him anymore, but mostly because Jules usually didn't allow people to submit him to such intense scrutiny. He usually turned his head aside if anyone tried because he was self-conscious about the way he looked. Because he had smooth skin and delicate features, and he thought they made him look like a girl.

Johnny didn't think Jules looked like a girl, but he realised with a sudden, sickening rush of clarity, that he did think Jules was beautiful.

Fuck.

Johnny closed his eyes and desperately wished the realisation away. Surely not even he could be that clueless? He'd known Jules for over a year and surely he would have noticed something like that before now? His current preoccupation with trying to figure out his sexuality must have coloured his perceptions somehow.

"I don't hate you, Johnny," Jules said, forcing Johnny to look at him again, "and I certainly would never wish you any harm."

Johnny nodded dumbly, finding himself so transfixed by the way Jules' mouth moved around the words that he barely heard them. It felt as if he'd been looking at Jules through a veil all this time and it had finally been lifted. How had he never noticed that Jules' eyes weren't the flat, uniform green that he'd always thought they were, but were actually flecked with gold around the pupils? Or that he had a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose?

It wasn't the spark that he was expecting, this slow creeping warmth that was spreading throughout his body, but not even he could mistake what it meant.

And he wished that he could. Maybe a few months ago it would have been okay. He could have told Jules how he felt and Jules would have been able to reassure him that it was just... hormones or something. That his stupid alien hormones had finally decided to start working and they'd latched onto Jules because they were friends; because they were close and Johnny was just confusing that closeness for something more.

But he couldn't tell Jules and he didn't want their relationship to be any complicated than it already was. He didn't know how he was supposed to stop this feeling now that it had started, but he knew that he had to. Jules might not hate him, but he definitely didn't like him very much at the moment. It had hurt enough before, but it would be unbearable if he felt like this, if he continued to have this indefinable need thrumming under his skin.

Jules sighed and got to his feet. "Mercy's probably started worrying that I've been abducted," he said. His expression was blank and shuttered once more. "I'd better get moving before she storms the school looking for me."

Johnny knew that he shouldn't watch Jules as he passed him. He should be trying to ignore this ridiculous feeling, not fuelling it. He couldn't help himself though.

Against all rules of logic, Jules had a nice ass.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Johnny's nose itched, but he didn't dare scratch it. He was taking such shallow breaths that his head had started to swim, but he didn't want to make too much noise. He wanted to fade away, to disappear, or failing that, be on the other side of the world right then.

The evening had started badly enough with Lex announcing that they all needed to spend some quality time together. They'd dutifully started on a game of Scrabble, but it had quickly become ugly, sparking an argument over whether or not hyphenated words were acceptable in the game that had resulted in Lex and Johnny's dad shouting at each other across the length of the living room, wielding dictionaries as if they were weapons.

Johnny's grandma had defused the situation by suggesting that they watch a movie, which gave them all an excuse to be sharing the same space but not talking to each other. Lex and Johnny's dad had glared at each other from opposite ends of the couch throughout the credits, but by the time the first scene had ended they were practically sitting on top of each other. They managed three more scenes before making some lame, mumbled excuses as they stumbled out of the room. Johnny had tried very hard not to notice that one of his dad's hands was down the back of Lex's pants.

Johnny's grandma had kept dozing off - waking herself up with a snort each time and asking Johnny exactly who the guy with the gun was and why he was trying to kill the woman in the wedding dress - before eventually giving up on trying to follow the plot, and going to bed.

Which had left Johnny sitting next to Jules without the comforting buffer of his grandma between them, trying desperately not to draw attention to himself in the hope that Jules would forget he was there and things wouldn't get weird. Then he could pretend, if only for a moment, that nothing between them had changed and they were still best friends, just hanging out as they used to.

The pretence was an almost impossible one, however, because they never used to sit in this heavy, oppressive silence and Johnny never used to be so aware of every movement that Jules made, no matter how slight. Johnny tried to keep his attention firmly fixed on the TV, but found himself watching Jules out of the corner of his eye more often than not.

Jules had curled his legs up on the couch and his bare feet were almost touching Johnny's leg. They might as well have been touching Johnny's leg, the way that his skin was tingling. Johnny was torn between his desire for Jules to just go somewhere else, somewhere far away so that he didn't keep making Johnny feel this way, and his desire for Jules to move that little bit closer, close the gap, and put his feet on Johnny's lap as he used to while they were watching TV.

Johnny knew wouldn't be the same anymore, though. It wouldn't be the same innocent closeness that they used to share, not when Johnny wanted it to be more than that.

He had thought that his newfound appreciation of Jules more physical attractions would have faded in the week since it had hit him like the proverbial ton of bricks in the locker room. He had hoped that it was all due to some sort of hormonal madness that would eventually be flushed out of his system.

Instead he had noticed more and more things to appreciate. He had appreciated Jules' full lips and the way he worried at the bottom one when he was deep in thought, the way his hair curled around his face and made a striking contrast against his pale skin, and the way that he filled out a pair of pants, which he'd found time to appreciate on numerous occasions. Today he was fixated on Jules' hands.

Jules had small hands but long, slender fingers, the sort of hands that Johnny would probably have described as artistic if he hadn't had the misfortune of hearing Jules torture innocent instruments in the name of music before. They were currently wrapped around the remote control, and Jules kept shifting them absentmindedly in a way that was practically obscene. Even though he knew that he should, Johnny couldn't stop watching them move.

"Are you feeling okay?" Jules asked.

Johnny mentally shook himself and looked up at Jules. He looked concerned.

"I'm fine," he said, fixing his attention on Jules' eyebrows because he'd yet to find anything particularly noteworthy about Jules' eyebrows and he didn't want to get distracted. "Why do you ask?"

"You just look a little flushed." Jules' eyebrows lowered slightly and faint lines appeared between them. "You're not feeling ill are you?"

It was heartening to know that Jules cared enough to ask, but humiliating beyond the telling of it that he'd noticed. "I don't get ill. I'm just a little hot, that's all."

The lines grew deeper. "You don't get hot either."

Johnny could see Jules shoulders shift. He was lifting one of his hands, stretching it out. God, if Jules touched him, then he'd know. There was no way that Jules wouldn't be able to hear what Johnny was thinking if they made contact, in fact Johnny was surprised that Jules hadn't noticed it before. His emotions had definitely been strong enough and Jules had always said that that was all it took. But maybe Johnny had been lucky and Jules hadn't been listening, or just hadn't cared to notice what might or might not be going on in Johnny's head.

Jules had told Johnny a long time ago that the best way for someone to block him from reading their mind, and the best way for him to block his own powers and stop them from overwhelming him on those occasions that they became too strong, was the mental repetition of a simple set of words, something that would mask all deeper thought. Jules always used nursery rhymes.

"What are you hiding from me?" Jules asked sharply, his hand stopping just shy of Johnny's left knee.

"Why do you think I'm hiding something from you?" Johnny thought he could almost feel the heat radiating from Jules' hand which, although impossible, wasn't very conducive to ordering his thoughts in a coherent manner, especially not when he had to keep chanting in his mind at the same time.

"Because you're practically shouting `Mary had a Little Lamb' at me. I taught you to do that." Jules forehead creased. "Is this about Dad? Do you know something?"

"No," Johnny said hurriedly and the unexpectedness of the question made him look Jules' face directly despite himself.

Jules looked a little angry and a lot scared and Johnny wanted to hug him, to hold him close and reassure him that everything was going to be all right, even though that might be a pretty lie. But he couldn't, now more than ever. He repeated the rhyme more forcefully.

Jules grimaced and rubbed at his forehead. "If it's not about Dad, what is it about?"

Johnny could have told Jules that he didn't have to tell him anything, that Jules himself had made it clear that they had no duty to share anything with each other at the moment, but that felt too much like a line he didn't want to cross. A bold line that would mark the fact that they definitely weren't friends anymore and Johnny wasn't willing to accept that as reality quite yet.

His comm. link trilled and Johnny could have kissed it. He resisted the urge, however, waving Jules' question away as he checked the screen. It was Robin, wondering if he could call into Gotham if he had a free moment that night.

"It's Robin," he told Jules. "There's been some sort of emergency and he needs me in Gotham."

He waited for Jules to call him out, but the other boy just slumped back on the couch, his posture defeated. "Fine. Robin calls and you have to drop everything and run straight to his side. I understand."

"We'll talk about this when I get back," Johnny said sheepishly, painfully aware of how cowardly both lies were, but more than glad to have the excuse to leave. "Okay?"

Jules didn't answer.

Robin had said that it was their biggest breakthrough yet. Johnny had no reason to doubt him, but he also had absolutely no idea why that might be the case.

He looked at the document displayed on the Batcomputer in what he hoped was a thoughtful way. It might as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all the sense it made.

"You have no idea what it's about, do you?" Robin asked with a smirk.

"Not a clue," Johnny admitted ruefully. "Biology isn't really my best subject."

Robin had the good grace not to laugh at that. "It doesn't matter. I don't think the subject of the paper is important, but this is."

Robin enlarged the front page of the document until it filled the entire screen. The title was full of terms like `vector', `transformation' and `somatic cells' which Johnny recognised but didn't really understand. He'd have to trust Robin that they weren't relevant. He didn't need anyone to tell him that the LexCorp logo in the centre of the page was relevant, or the symbol next to it. A symbol that looked a little like a stylised representation of a monkey.

"I still haven't been able to find out what that symbol actually means, but it's fairly clear it's associated with LexCorp," Robin said grimly. "I've managed to uncover several documents that feature it, but they don't seem to be connected in any way. They cover the gamut of scientific endeavour, but all of the more recent ones concern robotics."

"Robotics," Johnny repeated bleakly.

This wasn't blood on the floor or a dying man's terrified last words, this was official LexCorp documentation. Official LexCorp documentation bearing a timestamp that dated it all the way back to 2008.

Not even Jules could deny this as evidence.

"We've just hit a brick wall now." Robin scowled at the screen as if he could intimidate it into revealing its secrets. "The connection's definitely there, but that knowledge is useless if we can't figure out what that symbol represents. It could be some sort of code, or -"

"Robin, could I speak to you for a moment?" The cold voice echoed strangely, rebounding off the forest of stalactites that crowded the ceiling and startling a cloud of bats into flight.

Batman was standing in an open doorway at the highest point of the cave and was little more than a darker shadow in the gloom. Somehow, he still managed to look pissed.

Robin winced. "Sorry about this. I'd better go and see what he wants."

"I understand." Johnny smiled sympathetically. "I wouldn't want to keep Batman waiting either. I'd better head off home anyway."

He had no desire to do so, but he could always fly around Gotham for a while until he was sure that Jules would have gone to bed by the time he did eventually go back to the house.

"Don't go." Robin grabbed Johnny's wrist to hold him in place before he'd even started to move. "I won't be long and there's still something that I want to talk to you about." Robin's fingers brushed against Johnny's palm and he blushed, stepping backwards quickly. "I'm sorry. I...."

"It's okay. And I'll stay if you want me to," Johnny said, catching hold of Robin's fingers before he could pull them away.

He hated that he could make Robin feel this uncomfortable, but as he was becoming more and more intimately acquainted with that exact feeling himself, he could understand it a little better now. At least Robin didn't have to live with him.

"Thanks, Jon. I'll be back as soon as I can." Robin disentangled his fingers from Johnny's and smiled gratefully. "Stay right where you are."

Johnny was still nodding as Robin ran away, bounding up the stairs towards Batman and calling out, "Just make sure that you don't break anything," over his shoulder.

Johnny managed to stay where Robin had left him for almost a full five minutes before curiosity got the better of him.

The Batcave was nothing like he'd imagined it. The stink of bat guano and the poor lighting were hardly a surprise, but he hadn't expected it to be so cluttered. Batman didn't seem like the sort of person who would hoard, but the Batcave reminded Johnny of a museum. Possibly the strangest museum in existence, but a museum nonetheless.

Many of the `exhibits' were obviously trophies from enemies that Batman had defeated: a sword so wickedly sharp that it seemed to cut any light that hit it, a ragged shroud that surged upwards to press against the lid of its box when Johnny got too close, and a pack of cards containing only jokers that could only have belonged to one man.

There were stranger keepsakes that Johnny couldn't even begin to guess the provenance of. Quite why Batman would have kept a penny that was almost as big as the full-size mechanical T-Rex next to it was a mystery almost as compelling as how he could have managed to get either of them down into his subterranean lair without anyone noticing in the first place.

Johnny walked as lightly as he knew how to amongst the displays as his footsteps sounded loud and unwelcome in the silence of the cave. He felt like an interloper in this place, much as he expected that a visitor to his dad's Fortress might feel. As if he was wandering uninvited through Batman's memories.

The feeling intensified to outright guilt as he rounded the sleek form of the dormant Batmobile - carefully not thinking about how excited Jules would be right then because it only made his absence even harder to stomach - and saw the row of empty costumes set out in glass cases behind it.

Each of the cases was lit more brightly than any other part of the cave and the brightest by far was the one in the centre, which contained a costume that was unmistakably once worn by Robin. Its brilliant colours were dulled by rust-hued stains and it was beginning to fray around the edge of countless tears. A simple plaque at its base read: `A Good Soldier'.

Robin had told Johnny that there had been others who had borne the Robin name before him, but he'd never said why they'd stopped. Johnny was fairly certain that he could guess what had happened to at least one of them and that he was trespassing at a cenotaph that represented a very private man's very private grief.

It was no wonder that Jules hated reading people's minds. Some things were just not meant to be shared with strangers and Johnny felt a little unclean for having seen something that Batman would probably have never allowed him to willingly.

Johnny hurried back to the Batcomputer, hoping that Robin would have returned so that he could make his apologies and leave. It seemed that he was doomed to feel out of place everywhere at the moment.

Robin hadn't returned and, thankfully, neither had Batman. The Batcomputer was humming quietly to itself, still cogitating on the document that Robin had retrieved. Johnny sighed and sat down at the console, flicking idly through the document's pages so that he could at least pretend that he'd done something more productive than snooping around in Robin's absence.

A small link labelled: `Luthor, Alexander Joseph' at the very bottom of the last page caught his eye and he clicked on it, thinking that it might bring up the other papers that Robin had mentioned.

It didn't. Instead it led to a detailed dossier not unlike the ones that Johnny had seen in Lex's Olympus file: listing Lex's known associates, current LexCorp projects, and even his living arrangements. It chilled Johnny to see his own name there, alongside those of his dad, grandma and Jules. He couldn't really say why it disturbed him so much to see that his real name was in Batman's records - it was common knowledge that he lived with Lex Luthor after all - but it still did. He could at least take comfort that their names weren't linked to a dossier of their own.

`Superboy' was though, listed alongside `Superman' and `Morpheus' under the innocuous heading of `See Also:'.

Johnny's fingers trembled slightly as he clicked on `Superboy' and it seemed like hours before the page finally loaded. He chuckled at his own nervousness. Even if Batman did have information on Superboy it wasn't likely to be very comprehensive, he hadn't been in the Teen Titans long enough to really demonstrate his powers or even make much of a name for himself. He doubted that he'd piqued Batman's interest a great deal.

Any hopes that he had to that end were dashed when he saw that the dossier's heading of `Superboy' was followed in parenthesis by `a.k.a.: Kent, Jonathan Peter' and a veritable album of photographs of him.

Not only photographs of Superboy, but also of plain old Johnny Kent. There were pictures of him with his dad and Lex at some God-awful charity ball that Lex had forced them to go to last Spring, pictures of him moping around outside the barn at the farm in Smallville, and even a copy of the first school photograph he'd had taken at Centennial Park. The one that he'd forced his dad to destroy because it made him look like a psychopath who had just escaped from jail by way of a wind tunnel.

Johnny read the rest of the file in mounting disbelief. It covered everything about him: not only information about his powers and his weakness to kryptonite, but also personal information that he was certain should have no relevance to his career as a superhero. Not even Lex's notes had been this exhaustive, and Johnny had viewed them as a breach of the unspoken promise made when one knew a superhero's true identity. A promise that the two were to be treated as separate entities and that the hero's life when he wasn't wearing the costume was sacrosanct.

Johnny's mind whirled with questions that he almost didn't want to know the answers to. How did Batman justify this? Why did he think that he had the right? And, most importantly, had Robin read the file?

If he had then he'd known all along whom Johnny was, who his family were, and just what he might be instigating when he started dropping hints about Lex Luthor's involvement with the robots. Had he gotten close to Johnny just to make sure that Johnny would listen when he made his allegations?

Johnny's temples started throbbing and he rubbed at them distractedly with one hand as he closed the Superboy page and hovered the cursor over `Morpheus'. It was unlikely that even Batman had any useful information in this particular file. Lex had been meticulous in ensuring that nothing could possibly tie Jules to Morpheus. Unlike Johnny, who had naively assumed, like his father before him, that a pair of glasses and an inherent tendency to fade into the background was disguise enough to fool everybody. He had to make sure, though.

`Morpheus (a.k.a.: Luthor, Julian Laurence)' revealed itself slowly on the screen above a photograph of Jules in which he looked as though he'd been taken unaware by the camera; a shocked grin on his lips and his face half obscured by a thick tangle of auburn curls as he ducked his head.

Johnny didn't read any further than the section of Jules' file that contained information on his family - that named Lex Luthor as his father, his mother as a surrogate, and gave links to five other superhero's files as possible second fathers - because his vision blurred and no amount of blinking would clear it.

No one was supposed to know this about Jules. No one was even supposed to suspect it. Jules had said that his dad had been so careful and there was no evidence anymore, and yet here it was on Batman's computer. He'd been delving into the secrets of Jules' life, the parts of it that both Jules and Lex didn't even like to think about, never mind talk about, and why? Why did he need to know this? Why did he need to know this about any of them?

The throbbing at Johnny's temples intensified into sharp spikes of pain that shot through his skull and made his teeth ache. His vision phased in and out, first blackness and then a wavering image of the monitor before him that soon disappeared again. The strange heat that he'd felt while he was recuperating after his last brush with kryptonite returned, not just his skin but his entire body aflame with it this time.

He stumbled away from the computer, dizzy and nauseous, wanting to get home. Wanting his dad to tell him that he was going to be okay, his grandma to pet his hair and fuss over him, and Jules to... God, Jules. He had to tell him about this, had to let him know that whatever his dad had done, it hadn't been enough.

But he couldn't see well enough to find his way back to the door that Robin had led him through and he ricocheted blindly around the cave, crashing into something that smashed onto the floor behind him, something else that bent and buckled beneath his weight, and finally something soft that wrapped its arms around him and held him still.

"What's wrong?" Robin's voice was shrill with panic. "What happened?"

Johnny pushed him away roughly, barely even caring if he'd used too much of his strength.

"You knew all along didn't you?" he spat. "You pretended you didn't so that I'd... I'd tell you secrets about Lex or something. It was all a lie wasn't it?"

"I don't know what you're talking -"

"Liar." The heat rushed up Johnny's back, along his neck and pooled at the back of his head, pulsing in time with his too-rapid heartbeat. "It's all there on Batman's computer. Don't tell me that you haven't read it."

Johnny could hear Robin's uneven footsteps as he walked away, one foot scraping against the cave floor as if he'd hurt his leg, and then saw the hazy blur of his body as he came to a halt in front of the computer.

"I've never read any of the superhero case files that Batman keeps," Robin said after a moment of almost-silence that was broken only by the sound of his harsh, pained breathing. "You have to believe me that I never knew who Morpheus was until now. Or who I guess this means you are."

"Why should I believe you?" Johnny glared at Robin's indistinct form until his vision dissolved completely in a flash of red light. He was dimly aware that that should frighten him, but he was too angry to care. "For all I know, you and Batman have been using me from the start. Why should I trust you?"

"There's nothing I can say that would prove that I'm telling the truth, but I wouldn't lie to you. Not about something like this, Johnny."

"Don't call me that," Johnny screamed. "You have absolutely no right to call me that. My entire life's been turned to shit and I've lost my best friend because of this, so excuse me if I'm not exactly...."

The pain that lanced through Johnny's head was like nothing he'd ever experienced before, not even exposure to kryptonite had hurt as much, and the heat at the back of his neck surged forward, flaring in white-hot bursts across his eyes.

Something exploded and fragments of glass rained down on Johnny, sharp as daggers against his sensitised skin.

He heard Robin drop to the floor and roll, presumably getting behind some sort of cover. "Shit," Robin said shakily, barely audible over the roar of flames which Johnny wasn't sure were even real. "I didn't know you had heat vision."

"I don't. I mean, I didn't before now," Johnny said, closing his eyes. It didn't stop the pain and he was sure that eyes were boiling beneath his eyelids. "I've no idea how to turn it off now it's started."

"Maybe you should go and see Superman," Robin suggested cautiously. "He could probably help you with this. Tell you how to control it before you blow anything else up."

It sounded like fantastic advice, the best, but: "I can't open my eyes. How am I supposed to find Superman if I can't open my eyes?"

Robin sighed and Johnny could hear him scrabbling upright and then the slow drag of his feet as he limped towards him. He touched Johnny's elbow cautiously and, when it became apparent that Johnny wasn't going to throw him again, he tightened his fingers around Johnny's arm with more confidence.

"I'll show you to the door, and point you in the direction of Metropolis. I could ask Batman to fly alongside you in his plane, if you think that would help."

Johnny really didn't want to see Batman right then. "I'm sure that I can manage. It isn't as if there's much I can set fire to in the sky.

"Okay," Robin said softly.

Robin guided Johnny's steps until they reached fresher air that was stirred by a light breeze that did nothing to cool Johnny's heated body. "I wasn't lying before," he said as he gently turned Johnny around, presumably towards Metropolis. "I honestly had no idea who you were. I probably wouldn't have bad-mouthed Luthor if I'd known, but, no matter what, I still would have wanted to be your friend."

Johnny grunted and launched himself into the air with a lot less finesse than he usually executed the manoeuvre with.

"Thank you, Robin," he said stiffly, because his grandma had taught him that there was no good excuse for forgetting your manners, even with a person that you'd quite happily immolate with your newly discovered heat vision at that moment in time.

"Tim." Johnny heard Robin say as he flew above him. "My name's Tim."

Alarms screamed as Johnny burst through the front door. The momentum of his flight sent him crashing straight through the thick wood to land in a messy sprawl on the floor of the hallway, face pressed against the smooth tiles.

"Dad!" he yelled, voice lost beneath the alarms' insistent clamour. "Dad!"

A hand grabbed his shirt and roughly flipped him onto his back. It then turned gentle, patting his chest as the alarms spluttered into silence.

"It's Johnny, sir," Mercy shouted, her voice far too loud in the sudden quiet.

"So I see." Lex's voice, however, was low and calm. "What's happened, Johnny? Are you injured?"

"My dad," Johnny said, shrugging off Mercy's hand as he struggled to sit up. "I need to talk to my dad."

"Your father's not here." Johnny could hear the soft pad of bare feet against the tiles and then Lex's quiet exhalation as he knelt down beside him. "He received a call from the JLA just before you arrived. There's been some sort of alien incursion into Earth space, I believe. He didn't have the chance to fill me in on all the pertinent details, but he didn't seem overly concerned, so I don't think he'll be detained for very long. Is there anything I can do in the meantime?"

Johnny tried to nod, but even that slight movement made him feel like someone was taking a baseball bat to the back of his head. "Grandma," he managed to spit out through the pain.

"No doubt she's already awake," Lex said, ruffling Johnny's hair quickly as he stood up. "I'll go and fetch her. Mercy, if you could take Johnny -"

"I'll look after him, Dad," Jules said, wrapping an arm around Johnny's back and helping him to his feet. "You go and get Mrs. Kent."

Lex made a muted sound of agreement and Johnny could hear his quick, deliberate footsteps on the stairs, closely followed by the smart click of Hope and Mercy's boots.

"Thanks, Jules," Johnny said, leaning rather more heavily against Jules than was probably comfortable, but, for once, Jules didn't complain. "Mercy frightens me a bit."

"Hope and Mercy frighten everyone, Johnny. It's practically their raison d'etre." Jules urged Johnny to start walking by gently pressing on his back with an open palm. "Come on; let's find you somewhere more comfortable to sit than the hall floor."

Jules guided Johnny's steps until his shins hit something that yielded beneath them and then helped him to sit down. Johnny's head felt far too heavy for his neck as he lowered himself onto what he presumed was a couch, and it lolled forward so that his chin was resting on his chest. His headache redoubled its efforts at splitting his skull in two and he groaned, rubbing at his temples again in the vain hope that it would soothe the pain despite not working all the other times he'd tried it before.

"Maybe you should lie down," Jules suggested, tugging on Johnny shoulders. "You look about ready to collapse."

Johnny gratefully gave in to gravity and Jules' prompting and did let himself collapse, his head landing heavily in Jules' lap. Jules grunted, but did not try and push him away.

Jules ran his thumbs under Johnny's eyes after Johnny had settled himself. "You're crying," he said quietly.

"I am?" Johnny patted his face. It was wet. "God, Jules, what if my eyes are melting?"

Jules snorted and his thumbs trembled slightly. "I think melted eyes would be a little more... gunky. Why on earth would your eyes be melting anyway?"

"It feels like they should be, they hurt so much," Johnny said.

Johnny heard a sharp intake of breath from somewhere nearby and suddenly there were soft hands on his arms and the familiar, comforting smell of talcum powder and rose water.

"Oh, sweetheart, your poor eyes!" Johnny's grandma said, holding one of his hands against her cheek. "Did you get into a fight?"

"I got heat vision, Grandma." Johnny's throat constricted and he felt like he might actually start crying. He tried to tell himself that it was relief at being home and safe, but something about his grandma's concern made him feel like a little kid again, and he wanted to just give up on trying to be strong and let her coddle him as she used to when he was upset. "I didn't realise that it would be this painful. It doesn't hurt dad does it?"

"No, it doesn't," Johnny's grandma said slowly. "How did this happen?"

"I was with Robin in the Batcave and he was showing me some stuff on Batman's computer. He had to leave and I started poking around on my own and I... He has a file on me, Grandma, and one on Jules too. I just got so angry that he was keeping all this private information on us, that he must have been investigating us, and then I was suddenly setting things on fire."

"He has a file on me?" Jules asked, the muscles in his thighs tensing. "What does he know?"

"Everything, Jules. He knows everything. We need to go and tell your dad."

"You're not going anywhere, young man," Johnny's grandma said sternly. "You're going to stay here and rest. I'm going to go fetch you a blanket and an ice-pack, and then I'll call your mom, let her know what's happened to you."

"Thank you, Grandma," Johnny mumbled as she kissed his forehead. "Could I have some hot chocolate too?" His grandma's hot chocolate was as good as any medicine. It always managed to make him feel a little better, no matter what was wrong.

"Of course, darling," she said as she bustled off, an unusual vigour in her step.

Johnny suspected that a small part of her relished moments like this. She loved to have an excuse to spoil either of her boys, but their resilient Kryptonian bodies didn't offer too many opportunities to do so.

Jules' hands started moving again as soon as the door closed behind Johnny's grandma, fingers gently raking through Johnny's bangs. "How are you feeling now?" he asked.

"Better," Johnny said bravely, but was shocked to discover that it was true. The pounding in his head was easing and his eyes didn't feel like they were about to set fire to his eyelids anymore. "It's good to be home."

Jules hummed noncommittally. "You don't look any better."

"I feel calmer." Johnny didn't know whether it was his grandma's usual reassuring composure in the face of alien bizarreness or Jules' relaxing stroking. Probably his grandma, as Jules' stroking would likely be anything but relaxing if he allowed himself to concentrate on it. "It was really scary, Jules. I had no idea it was going to happen. All of my other powers developed gradually and I had time to get used to them. This just came out of nowhere and I don't know how to control it."

"It started because you were angry, right?" Jules' fingers skimmed along the edge of Johnny's jaw and then fanned out to frame his face. "If you're not angry anymore, perhaps it's stopped?"

"I don't know..." Johnny didn't feel angry, but there was still a strange feeling of potentiality behind his eyes, as if there was something there that was barely caged and aching to break free.

"You can't walk around with your eyes closed for the rest of your life. People would talk."

"I could set fire to the house," Johnny protested. "I could hurt you."

"I heal quickly," Jules said dismissively. "It'll be okay."

Johnny wished that he had some of Jules' confidence, but the other boy was right. Johnny had to be brave some time. He put his hand in front of his face - if he could burn himself with his own heat vision then there was something seriously wrong with Kryptonian physiology - and slowly opened his eyes. His eyelids seemed to stick to his dry, gritty eyeballs, but there was no pain.

He concentrated intently on his palm as his vision slowly cleared, and there was no sensation of heat, no blinding white light. He cautiously lowered his hand. Jules flinched slightly as their eyes met, but he didn't try and move away. He smiled faintly as if pleasantly surprised to discover that he hadn't burst into flames.

Johnny returned the smile. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself." Jules tilted his head to one side, looking at Johnny appraisingly. "It looks like someone's been pissing in your eyes."

"Gee, thanks, Jules." Johnny would have rolled his eyes if he could have been sure that they wouldn't pop out of their sockets if he tried. "That's good to know."

"No problem," Jules said, his hands sliding slowly from Johnny's face to rest on the couch. "I was just warning you so you know to avoid mirrors for the time being."

It suddenly felt weird to have his head on Jules' lap. It had been forgivable when Johnny was scared and confused, but it felt like too great an intimacy now that he was composed and fully aware of his surroundings again. He began to push away from Jules, but that felt weird as well. He didn't want them to go back to acting like strangers again, now that the immediate danger had passed. He was sick and tired of missing Jules. Sick and tired of everything about his life at that moment.

"Thanks for everything, Jules. You really helped me and you didn't have to do that."

"Yes, I did. As I told you before, I don't wish you any ill. You're still my best friend, Johnny, we just... had an argument, it happens." Jules' hands twitched. "I may also have overreacted a little. That also happens, more often than I care to admit. We could have reached some sort of compromise. You shouldn't have had to go something like this on your own."

Johnny shook his head. The room spun, and his stomach lurched in sympathy. "If you overreacted, then we both did. Maybe you trusted your dad too much, and maybe I trusted Batman and Robin too much. I'm certainly not sure if I made the right decision now."

"So, does that mean you think I was wrong to trust my dad, as well?"

"I don't know what it means," Johnny said, grabbing Jules' hand and pulling them both to their feet, "but I definitely think that your dad should know about those files. We'll have to see where things go from there."

Lex was in his office, sat at his desk, wearing blue silk pyjamas. His laptop was turned on, his fingers poised over the keys, but his eyes were fixed on the wall above it.

"How are you feeling, Johnny?" he asked as Johnny stepped uncertainly into the room. He turned his head and smiled, but the expression didn't seem to sit well on his face. His eyes looked tired and haunted.

"A little better, thanks," Johnny said, collapsing onto the worn leather armchair beside Lex's desk before he embarrassed himself by falling over. Jules perched on the chair's arm, one elbow resting on his dad's desk, the other on Johnny's shoulder. "I need to talk to you."

Lex swivelled his chair around so that he faced Johnny and Jules. "I'm listening."

Johnny swallowed nervously. It was difficult to know how Lex would react to his news. Lex was usually cool and collected about everything that life threw his way, but if he thought that Jules was being threatened he could be... frightening.

"I... I read some files on Batman's computer. He's been collecting information on superheroes and it looks like... like he knows about Jules' origins. He's been investigating who Jules' other father might be."

Lex's only reaction was to arch one of his eyebrows. "No evidence survives concerning Jules' origins. Any information that Batman has is pure speculation on his part. It's hardly a surprise, Batman's paranoid and he doesn't trust anyone, not even his fellow superheroes. I don't doubt that it's all part of some sort of contingency plan in case any meta goes rogue. I certainly can't fault him for that. He shows a level of foresight that is sadly lacking in most of his colleagues.

"I wouldn't worry about it. I can deal with Batman if needs be, and he's so scrupulous about security that it's highly unlikely that anyone else will ever see those files." Lex frowned. "In fact, I'm surprised that you even managed to read them, Johnny. There must have been something that he wanted you to see. Was there anything else in them of any interest?"

"I only read the first few sections," Johnny said, blushing. "I got really angry that he had them and I think... I think I might have blown up the computer with my heat vision."

"I see." Lex smirked, belatedly rubbing at his chin in an obvious effort to disguise it. "I doubt that he factored that eventuality into his plans." Lex then asked, "Is there anything else that you wanted to tell me?" almost as an afterthought, his eyes already drifting back towards his laptop.

It would have been easy for Johnny to say no. It had been easy to say no. But Johnny had put his trust in superheroes and they'd let him down, and maybe they were wrong about Lex too. Johnny had tried it Robin's way and whoever was making the robots was still free and still causing devastation. Maybe it was time to trust Jules. To trust his dad. To trust the people who knew Lex best.

"There's a symbol that Robin's interested in. He hasn't been able to find out what it means, but I thought you might know."

"Johnny, are you sure you want to do this?" Jules' voice in Johnny's head was a shock. They hadn't talked that way in weeks and Johnny had almost forgotten how natural it felt.

"You've read your dad's thoughts, haven't you? You're sure that he didn't do any of this?"

"Yes, but -"

Johnny closed his mind his mind to Jules with a burst of `Mary had a Little Lamb', reciting it much more quietly than he had earlier that evening. Jules frowned, but he looked more intrigued than angry.

Johnny grabbed a pen and pad of paper from Lex's desk and scribbled down the symbol. It didn't look exactly right, its `ears' were a little lopsided and its `tail' a little too long, but it was similar enough to be recognisable. He ripped off the top sheet of the pad and handed it to Lex.

Lex's hands shook as he looked at the paper and his face drained of all colour. "Where did you see this?" he asked, his voice urgent and sharp.

"It was on the front page of a LexCorp document that Robin showed me," Johnny said. "And some crates of robotics components in Gotham."

"It was branded on the forehead of the man who died in the warehouse in Edge City too." Jules' pale face mirrored his dad's. "I saw it on the photograph included in his autopsy report. Do you know what it means, Dad?"

When Lex finally answered, his voice was dry and emotionless as if he were reciting yet another of his tales of distant antiquity that he liked to spring on the unwary. "When I first founded LexCorp, I set up a special team to work on projects that I didn't want to be publicly associated with the company in any way. None of them were listed as employees in official documentation, and the research that they carried out wasn't constrained by any of the ethical or legal guidelines that usually govern that sort of work. All of the results that they sent me were marked with this symbol, so that our names wouldn't be linked and also so I would know to give any paper that bore it my immediate attention.

"It's a monogram representing the names of the four section heads of the team; a sop to their vanity as they couldn't bear complete anonymity. Their names were Dr. Bronson, Dr. Denham, Dr. Cheng, and Dr. Jennings."

Lex's finger traced the `monkey's' tail as he said the last name, lingering on its tip. Jules gasped, reaching over the desk towards his dad. Lex clasped Jules' hand without looking up from the paper.

"Do you think one of them might have made these robots?" Johnny asked.

Lex didn't answer the question, continuing his story where he had left it as if he hadn't been interrupted. "Dr. Jennings, in particular, was a brilliant man. Amongst other, less savoury, lines of research, he was involved in ground-breaking work involving infertility. It was eventually marketed to the agricultural industry as an alternative to artificial insemination, but I could see that there were much more interesting possibilities raised by the research. Personally interesting.

"Dr. Jennings hand-picked nine of his best scientists and I relocated them and the entire project to a former Balkan state where the laws regarding research of that nature were... more lax than those I had to work around here. Two years later, the only remnants of the project were two of the members of the original team and Jules."

Johnny knew that Lex hadn't exactly used the correct channels when he'd created Jules, but he'd had no idea that it had all been carried out so covertly. "What happened to the other scientists?"

There was a pause, barely even noticeable, and then Lex said, "They're dead, Johnny."

Dread uncurled cold tendrils in Johnny's chest. "How?"

The pause was longer this time. "Three of them committed suicide, no doubt sensing that their usefulness had ended. The other five... I had them killed."

"Killed?" This had been a mistake. Lex was everything that Robin had said he was and possibly more. Now he knew exactly what Batman knew about him, there was no telling what he might do. It was no wonder that he wasn't worried about Batman knowing about Jules.

And Jules was just sitting there, looking at Lex with his usual wide, adoring eyes and holding his hand as if it was the only thing anchoring him to the world. Johnny couldn't stand to look at them.

"I'm not proud of what I did. I'm not proud of anything I did then, but you'll have to forgive me for not being able to ever regret it fully. It gave me Jules, and I could never regret that. I can understand why the JLA think I'm behind what's been happening recently and I can understand why you would think that I am too. I don't expect you to believe I'm a good man, Johnny, but you do believe that I would do anything for Jules, don't you?"

Johnny nodded curtly. It was about the only thing about Lex that he had never stopped believing.

"Then you understand that I could never do anything that would put him any danger, and these attacks certainly have done." Lex cleared his throat. "The two surviving scientists were Dr. Mason and Dr. Jennings. Nate had severe gambling debts at the time and I knew that I could buy his silence easily. He was also a qualified medical doctor, so I employed him as my personal physician. That provided a suitable explanation for his extremely generous salary to anyone who cared to look into his finances and meant that I could keep a close eye on him.

"Dr. Jennings was an even simpler case. All he cared about was his research and he was happy to return to his work at LexCorp and not speak a word to anyone in exchange for the freedom the company gave him to take that research in any direction that he saw fit.

"About a year after Jules was born, I revaluated the direction that my company was moving in and shut down all of our less savoury projects. I wanted to make LexCorp something that my son would be proud to inherit. Unfortunately, that also meant that I had to stop the work that Dr. Jennings was involved in. I ensured that he had enough money to continue his research elsewhere and I'm afraid that I valued his silence so much that I didn't investigate what he was doing with that money too thoroughly.

"I do try to keep careful track of him, but my people haven't been able to find any trace of him for the past six months. I wasn't unduly worried as he quite often disappears for long stretches of time, but he always resurfaces when his money runs out. However, now..." Lex put the paper down on his desk and straightened it out carefully.

"Do you think that this Dr. Jennings is behind the robot attacks?" Johnny asked. It seemed plausible and he wanted it to be true so badly. Lex might be tangentially responsible by funding him, but he if hadn't known what Dr. Jennings had been doing with that money and if he wasn't directly involved, then perhaps life could start getting back to normal. And maybe Lex would know how to catch him.

"If it is a member of the research team that used this symbol, and I think that it almost certainly is, then it has to be Dr. Jennings. Dr. Cheng and Dr. Denham are dead. Of natural causes," Lex added hurriedly. "And Dr. Bronson is suffering from the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease."

Jules made a sort of strangled noise, half-sob and half-groan. "This is all my fault. If you hadn't made me then this wouldn't happened. All those people are dead and it's my fault."

"We don't know that it has anything to do with you, Jules," Lex said, pulling Jules into a rough, desperate embrace. "Yes, he worked on that project, but he also worked on hundreds of others, some of which were far more unpleasant. As I said, he's a brilliant man, and sometimes the line between brilliance and madness is a very fine one indeed. Anything could have sent him over the edge."

Jules was crying in truth now, face pressed against Lex's chest. "Dad..." he began weakly, but the rest of whatever he wanted to say came out only as a series of ragged sobs.

"Johnny." Lex caught Johnny's eye before Johnny could look away, embarrassed to be there to witness Jules' breakdown. "There are a number of things that I'd still like to ask you, but I think it can wait until the morning. You look exhausted."

The dismissal, as ever, was a welcome one. Johnny hurried out of the office gladly, closing the door firmly behind him to give Lex and Jules some privacy.

Johnny's face was so swollen the next morning that he could barely see his eyes in the mirror, and what he could see of them was a dark, even red as if something had burst deep within and flooded them with blood.

He prodded the inflamed flesh experimentally. Thin lines of pain arced across his cheeks and along his forehead, so intense that they almost forced him to his knees. He gagged, bile rising in his tightening throat, and braced his hands against the wall to steady himself. He concentrated on each deep breath that he took until the pain ebbed away to a manageable dull throb.

"Are you okay, son?" Johnny's dad asked, knocking politely on the closed bathroom door. "Do you mind if I come in?"

Johnny spat the bitter taste into the sink and rinsed out his mouth before he answered. "It's unlocked."

His dad shuffled into the bathroom slowly, leaning heavily against the door as he shut it behind him. He was still wearing his Superman costume and he swayed a little as he stood looking at Johnny with eyes that were flat and slightly unfocussed.

"Have you only just gotten home?" Johnny asked. "Lex said it would be a simple job."

"It was supposed to be, but the aliens put up more of a fight than we expected. They're usually a peaceful race and... It's not important right now" Johnny's dad sighed wearily. "How are you feeling? You look dreadful."

"Thank you, Dad. Between you and Jules, I think I might start getting a complex or something." Johnny resolutely turned his back on the mirror. "I'm actually feeling a lot better than I did last night. As long as I don't touch my face, it doesn't hurt at all."

Johnny's dad paused with his hand half-raised towards Johnny. He smiled apologetically and let his arm fall back down to his side.

"Your grandma told me that you developed heat vision. While you were at the Batcave. With Robin."

There was a strange note to his dad's voice that Johnny couldn't quite figure out; something that hovered between embarrassment and anger.

"Yeah, I read some files that Batman had on his computer about Jules and me. They had a lot of private information in them and some stuff about Jules that he doesn't want anyone to know. I just got really angry that Batman was investigating us and then... Hello, heat vision."

Johnny's dad chuckled, running a hand through his already messy hair. "You got angry? That's... good."

"It is?" Johnny didn't understand his dad sometimes. "I think I blew up the Batcomputer, Dad."

"And that's bad," Johnny's dad said, his mouth twitching as he tried, and failed, to frown. "You might have to apologise to Batman about that, although I think it's probably best if you leave it a little while so that he has the chance to calm down." He sniggered. "I thought he seemed a little... uptight last night."

"So now I've made Batman angry at me? Fantastic." Johnny leant against the sink with a groan. "Does this happen every time you get angry, Dad? How do you control it?"

"Not when I get angry, no." His dad's mouth twitched again. "Heat vision is a very useful power once it's been mastered. It took me a while to learn to control it, but my dad helped me, just like I can help you."

Johnny didn't think that he wanted to master it, not if it hurt this much every time that he used it. But perhaps it would get better and perhaps it was a sign that his body was changing once again, reshaping itself, and that he might yet get x-ray vision. He'd always wanted x-ray vision.

"That'd be great," he said. "Thanks."

"No problem," his dad said with a weary-looking smile. "So, have you told Lex about these files you saw?"

"Yeah, and about some other stuff that I probably should have told him a long time ago. I guess you haven't talked to him today?"

Johnny's dad shook his head. "Mom was waiting outside for me when I arrived home. When she told me that you'd gotten hurt, I came straight up here to check on you. I haven't seen Lex yet. How did he take the news?"

"Okay, I guess. He didn't seem all that bothered. He thinks that Batman will make sure that no one else ever finds out about the stuff he keeps... kept on his computer."

"He's probably right. Batman's very good at keeping secrets." Johnny's dad sounded slightly bitter, as if that was something that he didn't exactly approve of. "So what were these other things that you had to tell Lex about?"

Johnny wasn't sure if it was his really his place to tell his dad about Dr. Jennings and what Lex had done after Jules was born, but, if his dad didn't already know, he'd also hate for him to be surprised by it when he talked to Lex .

"There was this symbol that we kept seeing wherever the robots were, that seemed to be associated with LexCorp in some way. Lex said that it a LexCorp project group used it, one that he shut down a long time ago, and that he thinks one of the scientists from that group is the person behind the attacks. He was one of the people that created Jules and Lex said... Lex said that he had the rest of them killed."

Johnny's dad sat down heavily on the laundry hamper, which creaked ominously beneath his weight. "He's always thought that he'd have to pay for that someday."

"You did know about it, then?" Johnny had considered the possibility, but he hadn't quite believed it. His dad was Superman; he fought against the sort of people who did what Lex had done. Fought against them and made sure that they were punished for it.

Johnny's dad closed his eyes and he twisted the end of his cape around his fingers. He seemed reluctant to say anything at first, but his words quickly gained in momentum and volume when did he did speak, soon sounding much more confident.

"Lex told me even before we started dating, Johnny, that and whole lot of other things that were probably much worse. I don't condone what Lex did. I could never condone it, but I know he would never do anything like that again, that he regrets everything that he did and that he's spent years trying to put it right. That's why I knew that he could never have been involved with the attacks."

And that was something else that Superman had always stood for: forgiveness and second chances. The belief that no one was ever really lost, and that they could change for the better.

"I think I understand that now, Dad." Johnny didn't know if he trusted in Lex's good intentions quite as fully as his dad did, but he did know that Lex would never have put Jules' life in danger; even though it had taken Lex to point that out to him in the end. It resonated with him in a way that nothing else that his dad or Lex had said did. "He wants to talk to me again today about what I know."

Johnny's dad groaned quietly, but still stood up. "Then I think we should go and find him, then. Knowing Lex, he's eager to get started. "

Lex's study had been transformed overnight into something resembling a War Room.

Apart from the desk, all of the furniture had been removed, replaced by simple metal shelves filled with files and computer consoles running complicated programmes that made their screens fill over and over again with seemingly random symbols. The desk itself was buried beneath a drift of printouts which appeared to have been neatly stacked at one point, but had since collapsed under their own weight. The paper had partially buried a bank of telephones which blinked intermittently as calls were received and then redirected elsewhere.

Lex was pacing around the room, talking into a headset while he read something on his PDA. He paused by the doorway and flashed Johnny and his dad a very brief, very watery smile. Johnny's dad grabbed Lex's hips as he turned on his heel and pulled him close before he had chance to walk away again. Lex stiffened for a moment as though preparing himself to break free of the embrace, but the fight seemed to leave him in a sudden rush and he slumped, resting the back of his head against Johnny's dad's shoulder.

Johnny edged past them and cast his eye around for somewhere to sit. He almost missed seeing Jules as he scanned the room because the other boy was so still, huddled against a wall with his forehead resting against his knees and his arms wrapped around them. Even the normally bright colour of his hair seemed dulled.

He didn't raise his head when Johnny sat down next to him, but Johnny could feel the slight tingle of awareness in his mind that meant Jules knew he was there.

"Dad can't find him," Jules said, burrowing his head even deeper into the circle of his arms. "He's had teams of people scouring the city all night and they haven't found a single trace of him."

"Maybe he's not in Metropolis," Johnny suggested quietly.

Jules' shoulders hitched slightly. "Dad thinks he is. Dad thinks he has to be. He can't..." Jules sniffed and his shoulders hitched again.

Johnny reached for Jules automatically, forgetting for a moment that things still weren't quite right between them and that maybe Jules didn't actually want Johnny to be so close to him. Jules uncurled as soon as Johnny touched him, however, pressing his damp face into the hollow of Johnny's neck and clinging on to him tightly.

Jules had always been the one comforting Johnny in the past and it was strange to have their roles reversed now. Johnny felt clumsy and awkward, unsure where to put his hands. They settled naturally on the waistband of Jules' pants, so Johnny kept them there, too scared to move them.

"It'll be okay," he said, resting his chin on top of Jules' head. "They'll find him and then... It'll be okay, Jules."

"That's just what Dad said." Jules' lips brushed against Johnny's skin as he spoke and Johnny could feel it all the way down to the soles of his feet. "It doesn't really make me feel any better though."

Johnny hooked his fingers below Jules' jaw and gently moved Jules' head back. He was so pale that his skin looked almost grey, the shadows below his bloodshot eyes as dark as bruises. "You look exhausted. Have you slept at all?"

"No." Jules pressed his cheek against Johnny's hand, his eyelids fluttering closed. "Dad hasn't either. He's been up all night trying to sort things out and I couldn't just leave him to do it on his own. I don't think I would have been able to sleep anyway."

Jules' breath was warm on Johnny's face, his skin warm against his palm, and for a wonderful, terrifying moment, Johnny thought that he was going to kiss Jules. That he wouldn't be able to stop himself. He bit the inside of his cheek so hard that his teeth sliced through the soft flesh, filling his mouth with the metallic tang of blood.

"None of my teams have found anything. We're running out of places to look."

Johnny had almost forgotten that Lex was there, that there was anything in the room but Jules and him, so the voice shocked him. He suddenly felt guilty and self-conscious, sure that the heat that he was feeling, what he wanted, would be obvious to even the most cursory inspection. Sure also that Lex would want to kill him if he could see it. He dropped his hands hurriedly.

But Lex wasn't even looking at them. He threw his headset down on the desk, sending a fresh flurry of papers floating to the floor, and pushed himself away from Johnny's dad.

"It's only been one night, Lex. The JLA have been looking for this guy for weeks and we haven't found anything either." Johnny's dad tried to grab at Lex's arm, but Lex slipped away from him. "We just have to give it time, be patient, he's bound to make a mistake and then -"

"We don't have time, we've wasted too much already," Lex snapped, hunching over one of the computers and tapping frantically on the keyboard. "There must be something that we're missing. Jules, you said that you saw the autopsy report on the man who died in Edge City, do you remember any of the details from it?"

"Mr. Kent didn't show you a copy?" Jules asked, eyes darting between Lex and Johnny's dad.

"I haven't even seen it myself, Jules," Johnny's dad said. "Batman has been keeping a lot of things very close to his chest recently. I suspect that he didn't want to risk anything getting back to Lex before he wanted it to. I'm surprised that he'd take the risk of having you read it."

"I'm sure I wasn't supposed to, but Robin brought a copy for Johnny to read and I just happened to be there when he did." Jules snorted. "Given that Batman knows who we both are, I presume Robin wasn't supposed to be showing it to Johnny either. I'm not sure that that would have stopped him, though."

This last was said with a sly sidelong glance at Johnny that Johnny chose to ignore. He'd given up on ever working out what Jules' problem with Robin was.

"You're probably right. I think I'm going to have to have serious words with Batman about this. I don't know what the hell he was trying to achieve by holding all this information back from the rest of us," Johnny's dad said, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms. He looked exhausted too, worn-out and spread thin. "So, do you remember anything you think might be useful? Anything at all?"

Johnny shook his head. He'd barely even looked at the report, only flicked quickly through the pages quickly to show willing, his attention firmly elsewhere. The memory of what had happened in Edge City had been too raw at the time and he'd had no wish to relive it.

"I remember his name. I thought I had to know his name," Jules said quietly. "It was Paul Freeman."

"Paul Freeman," Lex repeated, his head snapping up like a dog catching a scent. "I recognise that name. Does it mean anything to you, Clark?"

Johnny's dad frowned. "It does sound kinda familiar."

"Just let me check my files," Lex said, moving from the console to his laptop.

He pressed his thumb to the optical sensor just above the keyboard, which brought up a whole series of password boxes into which Lex typed long strings of numbers and letters. He then spoke the final password, a complicated phrase in something that sounded like either Greek or Latin, before the screen flickered and flashed, finally clearing to display a file that seemed very similar to the one Johnny had read on the laptop weeks ago. This particular file was labelled `Hades', however, and appeared to contain a lot more information than `Olympus' had.

Johnny didn't know whether either of them were the same file at all. The files he had found certainly weren't as heavily protected as this one and he had to wonder whether the suspicion he'd had at the time that Lex wanted him to read them hadn't been completely unfounded.

"Here it is," Lex said, his voice rising with a note of triumph. "Paul Freeman, also known as the Atomizer." He chuckled grimly. "I wouldn't have thought Jennings would have wanted to ally himself with someone like that. It was widely known that the Atomizer was unstable and difficult to work with... He did hold a doctorate in Applied Physics, though."

"Dr. Jennings is a geneticist, isn't he?" Jules asked. "Maybe the Atomizer was helping him with the robots."

"You could be right," Lex agreed, scrolling through the entry on the Atomizer. "Although I'm certain that Jennings only needed only very minimal assistance, if that was the case. He was well acquainted with the work that Dr. Cheng was carrying out for LexCorp and understood it perfectly. There was very little that he couldn't master if he put his mind to it.

"Now that I know that he's most likely involved, I can see echoes of Cheng's work in the robots, although they're far more advanced than anything she ever produced. Her robots were also often far more fanciful than their utility demanded. I remember that she designed some robots that looked like monkeys that were meant to defuse landmines and another that looked like a dragon for a defence project that LexCorp was involved with." Lex dragged his hand over his face and sighed shakily. "I wish I'd been able to study Goliath's remains more closely before handing them over to the authorities. I might have noticed the connection sooner."

The mention of Goliath sparked a memory of that dreadful day in Johnny's mind. He'd tried to forget everything that happened on that rooftop, but the images were still horribly vivid, as bad memories so often are. He remembered the Atomizer taunting Superman, telling him that he'd learned a lot in jail, just before he called the robot to him.

"I think that he might have found something out while he was in jail," Johnny told Lex. "Maybe Jennings contacted him there somehow?"

"I'd forgotten about that," Johnny's dad said, grinning at Johnny. "We can't talk to the Atomizer, but perhaps we can find whoever introduced him to Jennings. They might be able to -"

"Paul Freeman's cell mate from Stryker's Island was found washed up beside Hobb's River three weeks ago," Lex said, closing the file he was reading with an angry stab of his finger against the keyboard. "He was so badly burnt that they could only identify him using his dental records. Jennings seems to be very adept at covering his tracks."

"What are we going to do then, Dad?" Jules asked, leaning heavily on Johnny's shoulder as he pushed himself to his feet. "If he's hidden himself so well, how are we ever going to find him?"

"I have an idea, but it's risky. I had hoped to avoid having to resort to putting it into action, but I'm afraid that my options are growing narrower by the hour. Things have been quiet recently, but I doubt that it will last. We have to stop Jennings before he has the chance to prepare another attack." Lex turned around and looked at Jules for the first time since Johnny and his dad had entered the study. His eyes widened. "You need to get some sleep, Jules. I should have sent you to bed hours ago."

"I wouldn't have gone," Jules said, jutting his chin out defiantly, "and I won't go now. I need to help."

"You won't be much help if you can hardly stay awake. In fact, I think that all of us could do with a little rest. If any important information comes to light, then Hope and Mercy have their orders to inform me of it straight away. We can afford to take a few hours off."

Jules nodded with apparent relief. "If you hear anything, you'll wake me up too?"

"Of course," Lex said, but Johnny was fairly certain that he was lying.

Jules stumbled as he began to walk, and Johnny rose quickly with the intention of helping him up to his room. Jules shook off his hand, but the quick smile that flashed across his face lessened any offence that Johnny could have taken at his refusal.

"I think I can manage to put myself to bed, John," he said, "but I do appreciate the offer."

Johnny's own smile remained long after Jules had left the study. All inappropriate urges that he might have to kiss Jules aside, it finally felt like their friendship was getting back to how it used to be.

"I'll turn in now myself, Lex," Johnny's dad said, stretching languorously and not even bothering to stifle his yawn. "Are you coming?"

"Just give me a minute. I need to speak to Johnny about something."

Johnny's dad looked as if he might protest, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he simply yawned again.

Lex grinned, nudging Johnny's dad towards the door. "I'll tell you about it later, Clark. It's nothing you need to worry about."

"What is it, Lex?" Johnny asked anxiously as soon as he heard his dad's heavy tread fade away. His dad might have no reason to worry, but there had been no reassurances that Johnny shouldn't either. He thought that Lex had every right to be angry at him. He might have caused untold damage by his unwillingness to trust Lex sooner.

Lex walked to the desk and began half-heartedly sorting through his papers. "I think I owe you an apology, Johnny."

"You do?" Johnny asked in puzzlement. He hadn't expected this. "Why?"

"I knew that you were... investigating my movements and I left some files of my own for you to find. I'm afraid that I used you in just the same way as Batman did, and I'm sorry for that."

"The Mockingbird files?" Johnny was right; they had been different and deliberately so. "I thought you might want me to read them at the time, but I never thought to wonder why. I'm sorry that I was sneaking around behind your back, Lex."

"I was hoping that you'd see something on the files pertaining to the robot attacks that you recognised and tell someone about it. Whether it was me, your father, or even Batman, I didn't much care. I just knew there was something that you and Jules weren't telling me, some connection I wasn't aware of, but that neither of you were willing to come to me with it.

"I realise that that's no excuse for what I did, but I was growing desperate. I hope you can forgive me for that."

It did sting Johnny a little, the knowledge that both Batman and Lex had both been using him and that he'd fallen for it on both counts. If they'd just come and asked him what he knew, then... Well, they'd probably be in exactly the same situation they were in now. Johnny was fairly certain he wouldn't have told either of them anything.

"Jules really never told you about any of this? About the symbols we found? Or the man... Paul Freeman?" Johnny asked. That was the hardest part of all this to understand. It seemed contrary to everything Johnny knew about Jules and Lex's relationship that his friend would ever keep things from his dad.

"Apparently, you'd asked him not to tell me about anything the investigations that the Teen Titans were involved in and he refused to break that promise."

Even after they'd fallen out, Jules still wouldn't go back on his word. Johnny didn't know whether he would have been able to do the same if their situations had been reversed. "I can't believe he did that."

"He thinks very highly of you and he didn't want to let you down."

"He's a good friend." Johnny mumbled. That didn't even come close to describing how he felt about Jules, but he didn't think that he had the words to describe that feeling just then.

"More than anything, I'm sorry that what I did, and everything that's happened recently, caused problems between the two of you."

"We're okay," Johnny said. "I think that we've managed to sort everything out."

If that wasn't entirely true right now, then Johnny was going to do everything in his power to make sure that it soon was. And then when it was, he would make sure that he never let anything come between them again.

"... Whoever we're dealing with is a very disturbed individual."

Johnny muted the television as soon as Lex's interview finished airing. It was the third time that he'd seen it that evening - it seemed to be the lead story on every single news show - but he still couldn't work out what Lex had been trying to achieve by giving it.

"Your dad basically just cast aspersions on Jennings' intelligence, sanity, and his..." Johnny paused, trying to think of the right words. They didn't come. "The size of his dick. Is he trying to piss him off?

Jules snickered. "I think you might have imagined that last part, but yes, I think that's exactly what he's trying to do."

"It's not funny, Jules," Johnny said, glaring at his friend. "Jennings is dangerous. Lex shouldn't be provoking him."

"And I'm sure Dad knows that. But now, despite Jennings' best efforts, everybody knows that Dad isn't behind the attacks, even if they still don't know exactly who is. Jennings obviously wanted to scare my dad, but now he knows that he isn't scared of him at all. All of his carefully laid plans have failed and he's bound to be angry and desperate. It should force him into making a mistake. He's been in control for far too long."

"He'll come after your dad." Johnny couldn't understand why Jules didn't see that. Why Lex didn't seem to either. "He's put himself in a lot of danger."

Johnny's dad understood. He'd begged Lex not to do the interview and then, after Lex had refused to listen to reason and gone ahead with it anyway, he'd begged him to go into hiding, to get out of Metropolis until the JLA managed to catch Jennings. Lex had refused to listen to that idea too.

He trusted his people to keep him safe. Trusted the as-yet-untested weapon that LexCorp had developed using Dr. Cheng's notes which was supposed to disable the robots instantly. Trusted Superman to save him if it came to that. From the vicious arguments that Johnny's dad and Lex had been engaged in for the past few days, arguments that they didn't even seem to have the presence of mind to try and conceal from their sons as they usually did, Johnny guessed that his dad was pretty much close to cracking, close to flying Lex to the Arctic and locking him in the Fortress for his own protection as he kept threatening to do.

"Maybe," Jules said slowly, "but he can look after himself, Johnny. He can look after the city and make sure that everyone's safe. He might not have superpowers, but he can do that."

Johnny knew that it was useless to argue. Jules would never concede that Lex might be taking on too much, that perhaps his plans weren't always airtight. He thought that his dad was Superman, Batman and, hell, probably the entire of the JLA, rolled into one. Johnny thought that Lex half-believed that himself as well at times. Believed that he could take on anyone, no matter how powerful they were, and win. If Johnny's dad couldn't disabuse Lex of that notion, then Johnny had no idea how he could ever persuade Jules that his dad was perhaps overestimating himself.

Jules plucked the remote out of Johnny's unresisting hands and started flicking through the channels on the TV, obviously convinced that their conversation had ended and, knowing Jules, convinced also that Johnny's silence meant that he had been won over to the right side. The Luthor side.

Jules then collapsed into a sprawl, swinging his feet up from the floor to land heavily in Johnny's lap. It had been their default position for watching television for a long time - Johnny pressed up against one arm of the couch and Jules colonising the rest of it, treating Johnny like an extension of the furniture. In the past, they would have tussled for a while - some mostly good-natured shoving and name-calling - before Johnny allowed the imposition, but he was too relieved that Jules felt comfortable enough to act normally to draw any attention to the fact that he was.

The problem remained, however, that although Jules might feel normal around Johnny again, Johnny still didn't feel normal around Jules. Usually, he would put up some form of resistance even after he'd surrendered, tickling the soles of Jules' feet or pinching his toes, so that he could get his revenge in some small way for his defeat when Jules inevitably got so annoyed that he kicked out and bruised himself on some part of Johnny's invulnerable body. However, he felt as if he couldn't trust himself to touch Jules at all, even in an antagonistic way.

He clenched his hands into fists and stared resolutely at Jules' feet, trying to force himself into feeling okay about them being there. His eyes slid away, seemingly of their own volition: tracing the line of Jules' legs, the curve of his back, the pale length of his outstretched arm, the long fingers that were curled around the remote in that vaguely obscene way again. Johnny shifted uncomfortably.

"What's wrong?" Jules asked casually, eyes still fixed on the TV.

Johnny had wanted to tell Jules for weeks, but he hadn't found the chance in the few days since they'd actually started speaking again. Someone had always been around when they'd been at home and Johnny would rather die than bring it up at school, but right now his dad and Lex were out at a restaurant because they'd needed a change of scenery for their ongoing argument, his grandma and Mrs. Branch were at their weekly Bridge game, and, although Mercy was patrolling around the house, she could be counted on to stay out of their way unless one of them screamed.

It was the perfect opportunity, but Johnny still found himself hesitating. He couldn't be sure that Jules wouldn't react badly, that maybe it was too soon after they'd repaired their friendship to be springing something like this, but he needed to speak to someone and Robin really wasn't an option this time.

Johnny's throat suddenly felt dry and tight and he coughed a couple of times to try and clear it. It didn't help and when he did speak, the words still came out sounding scratchy and embarrassingly high-pitched. "I think I might be gay."

Jules didn't even flinch. "Oh," he said. "Okay."

Johnny waited expectantly for him to say something else, but Jules' thumb just kept tapping against the buttons of the remote in exactly the same rhythm as before. Johnny had thought that he had imagined all of Jules' possible reactions, but he hadn't even considered that complete disinterest might be one of them. Perhaps Jules had misheard him?

"Jules," he said, taking care to make his words clearer and less open to misunderstanding, "I think I might -"

"Be gay. Yes, I heard you the first time."

Johnny might as well have just announced that he wanted pizza for dinner for all the consideration that Jules was offering him. He'd twisted himself into knots over this for weeks, and Jules had just found a show about cars and was settling down to watch it.

"Are you okay with that?" Johnny asked, desperately hoping to get some sort of reaction from his friend, even if it was negative.

"Of course I am." Jules glanced over at Johnny and evidently there was something in Johnny's face that caught his attention, because he didn't look away again. "Did you think I wouldn't be?"

It had been something that Johnny had considered. The worst-case scenario. "You always say that it's disgusting when our dads kiss. I thought perhaps -"

"I might be a secret homophobe, despite all other evidence the contrary." Jules grimaced, in much the same way as he did whenever his dad and Johnny's got too friendly in company. "He's my dad, Johnny. It wouldn't matter who he was kissing, I still wouldn't want to see it. It's probably not quite as bad for you as I presume you can remember a time when your mom and dad were intimate with each other, but I was literally created in a test-tube and Dad never dated. I grew up happily deluded that he was actually a eunuch. Or possibly had moulded underpants like a Ken doll. I'm still coming to terms with the fact that he's... a person who likes to do that sort of thing."

"A Ken doll?" Johnny asked, trying not to laugh and largely succeeding.

"Trust you to latch on to that," Jules said with a scowl. "Dad doesn't believe in gender-specific toys and Ken fulfilled his function as pilot of my fighter plane admirably." Jules' scowl was slowly replaced by a warm, supporting-best-friend-in-his-time-of-need smile. "We shouldn't be talking about me anyway. We should be talking about you. How long have you felt like this?"

Johnny suspected that the question might be a diversionary tactic, but as it was what he'd wanted to talk about in the first place, he answered it anyway. "Well, you know that I've never been interested in girls, but I'd never been interested in boys either. I would have told you before if I was. Then, when I was in Gotham a few weeks ago, Robin kissed me and -"

"Robin kissed you." Jules' eyes closed briefly, his fair eyelashes trembling.

Johnny couldn't judge anything of Jules' reaction from his tone of voice or his expression, both of which were completely unreadable. He guessed that Jules didn't approve, though, given how far Robin appeared to have sunk in his estimation. "Yeah, Robin kissed me and it got me thinking, made me realise that I was interested in guys."

`Or a guy, at least,' remained unspoken, because Johnny found that he didn't dare say it. Jules was taking everything in his stride, which really shouldn't be as surprising as it was, and Johnny didn't want to jinx anything. He might be cool with Johnny being gay in the abstract, but he could still freak out if he was made aware of the particulars. Having just had to suffer through losing Jules' friendship once, Johnny wasn't willing to risk it happening again.

"So, are you and Robin dating now?" Jules asked, turning his head back towards the television.

"No. We get on really well and everything, but I don't really... I don't like him that way."

"Oh," Jules said again, but this time a small smile accompanied the word. Johnny thought he was probably relieved that he didn't have to make nice with Robin on account of him being his best friend's boyfriend.

"Are you sure we're okay, Jules?" Johnny asked, looking for reassurance that he wasn't sure he even needed. He hoped that the conversation that he was inevitably going to have to have with his parents would go this smoothly.

"Whatever happens, we're always going to be okay." Jules' smile grew broader. "Even if it does take us a while to get there."

"I can't believe Robin kissed you," Jules said for what was possibly the hundredth time since their conversation the previous night. He never let go of an idea easily, and Johnny was certain that this was going to be a favourite topic of his for days, if not weeks, to come. "Well, you know what they say: You can't trust a boy who wears hot pants on a regular basis."

Johnny bit the side of his hand to stop himself from laughing out loud. "I've never heard that one before, Jules. Who says that exactly?"

There was a slight pause in which Johnny could only feel the vague shape of Jules' racing thoughts and then: "Admittedly, at the moment, it is just me who says it. It'll catch on soon enough, though, believe me."

"I hope you're not going to give Robin a hard time about this. He's a -"

"Kent, do you think you could tell me what the by-product of this reaction is?" Mr. Martin's abrupt voice derailed Johnny's train of thought, forcibly severing his connection with Jules.

Johnny looked at the incomprehensible mess of chemical formulae and arrows covering the whiteboard, and couldn't recognise any of it. Although having a telepathic link with Jules was a good thing on the whole - they never had to resort to the far riskier method of passing each other notes in class - it did prove rather distracting at times, and had led to him getting into trouble at school more times than he cared to count.

"Um," he stalled, feigning deep concentration as he desperately tried to remember if he'd accidentally overheard anything that Mr. Martin had said over the past half hour.

Jules sighed, flipping his glasses onto the bridge of his nose from where they had been resting on the top of his head. He glanced at the board for a split second, before saying, "It's water, Johnny," in an incredulous tone that suggested all sorts of unflattering things about his opinion of Johnny's intelligence.

"The by-product is water, sir," Johnny said quickly, too thankful for the opportunity to not look like the idiot that he usually did in Chemistry class to even be annoyed.

Mr. Martin looked pleasantly surprised. "The answer is indeed water, Kent." He turned back to the board and wrote H2O at the end of one of the curving arrows. "I'm glad to see you didn't need the usual prompting from Luthor. Perhaps -"

The ground rumbled and a beaker fell from a shelf, smashing against the linoleum-covered floor and obscuring the rest of Mr. Martin's words. Edwards made a satisfyingly girlish squeak of alarm from the other side of the lab and several boys got up from their stools, looking around wildly.

"Gentlemen, please," Mr. Martin said soothingly. "It was only a slight tremor. It's nothing to be alarmed about."

The green lenses of Jules' glasses obliterated most of the expression in his eyes, but when they met his, Johnny could still see how huge his pupils were beneath them. How scared he must be. "An earthquake? In Kansas?" Jules' mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out. "Rare as fucking hen's teeth, Johnny. We need to get out of here."

Johnny was already getting to his feet as he asked, "What is it? Can you sense something?"

Jules shook his head. "No, but I do have a really bad feeling about this. I'm not supposed to know, but Dad's been having Hope and Mercy patrol the school's perimeter while we're here. We should try to meet up with them."

"Kent. Luthor. Sit down right now." Mr. Martin's voice was sharp as a whip-crack. "There's no reason to -"

The ground bucked upwards, cracking like an egg. The cracks raced from wall to wall, knocking Mr. Martin off his feet, and overturning tables, sending boys scrabbling for cover. Someone screamed, maybe Edwards, maybe not. Johnny found that he didn't really care.

"We need to get everybody out of here," Jules said, grabbing Johnny's arm and pulling him close. "I think... I think I might know why Jennings has been so quiet lately."

Jules took a step towards the door, dragging Johnny behind him. The floor in front of the door split as they neared it, and something metallic emerged from the hole. Johnny didn't have time to see what it was before Jules shoved him away, towards the windows. "We're on the ground floor," he whispered roughly. "You can make sure that everyone gets a soft landing and get them far enough away from the building as possible. Come back here as soon as they're safe. I'll try and hold this off as best I can until then."

"I'm not leaving you on your own, Jules," Johnny said. He couldn't believe that Jules would even think that he could.

"Just because I quit the Teen Titans doesn't mean that I stopped wanting to be a superhero, John. I can look after myself, which is more than I can say about anyone else here who isn't you."

Jules looked pale, scared, and far smaller even than he usually did, far too frail to be taking on one of Jennings' robots on his own, but Johnny knew that he was right. Johnny wasn't dressed as Superboy, but being a hero didn't stop when you took off the costume. It couldn't. Jules was the only person that he gave a damn about in the room, but that didn't mean that they weren't worth saving, didn't mean that he should let his personal feelings get in the way of doing the right thing.

Before he could even begin about thinking about evacuating the lab, however, something shot out of the hole by the door: a long, articulated arm, easily as thick as Johnny's torso, tipped with three sharply-pointed claws. It waved around for a moment as if it were searching for something, then curled around Jules, yanking him off his feet. Johnny leapt after him, but he was too slow, and his fingers brushed uselessly against the soles of Jules' shoes as his friend was hoisted into the air.

"Don't worry, Johnny," Jules said, words clipped and hoarse as if he were fighting for breath. "Honestly, I can take care of myself."

Jules closed his eyes and the windows imploded. Someone started shouting, their voice mingling with the screams, but Johnny could barely hear any of it. Everything around him took on the air of unreality and all he could see was Jules' face and how it was slowly draining of blood, how the firm line of his mouth was slackening.

The arm juddered slightly as the thick metal of its armour plating peeled away, and its grip on Jules appeared to be loosening incrementally. Johnny jumped before he could even think to worry about using his powers in front of witnesses without his Superboy disguise or whether this robot was armed with kryptonite as so many of the others had been. The robots were strong, but he was sure he was stronger. He could break the arm holding Jules, or pull it away, and -

A second arm emerged from the hole as Johnny passed over it, too quick for him to grab onto it or change the direction of his flight. It curled briefly around his waist and then flicked him against a wall, using his own momentum against him.

Johnny crashed through the wall, sailed across the corridor beyond, and through the wall beyond that. He dug his feet into the floor as soon as he'd dropped far enough to do so, his heels ploughing deep furrows through the tiled floor and the concrete beneath. As soon as he'd slowed his flight sufficiently to be able to influence his movement somewhat, he spun around so that he faced the school's front door. The abrupt change in direction tangled his legs and sent him to his knees, but he didn't bother trying to stand, just half-crawled, half-stumbled towards the parking lot.

It was incongruously quiet and calm outside, although Johnny could hear the faint sounds of approaching sirens. He had been expecting to see Hope and Mercy racing towards the school with their guns drawn, but there was no movement, no sound of hurrying feet. No matter how much Lex's bodyguards might scare Johnny, he knew that he needed them. He couldn't deal with the robot on his own.

As he edged around the side of the school, he could see why Hope and Mercy hadn't been able to come to their aid. The rest of the parking lot had collapsed, and Hope and Mercy were slumped beside the crater, unmoving. They hadn't even had time to draw their guns and Mercy's legs were bent at an unnatural angle beneath her.

Johnny dropped down beside them, pressing his fingers desperately and probably a little too roughly against their wrists. They didn't stir, even though his grip was so tight that it was leaving bruises, but he could feel the faint pulse of their blood.

He sat for a moment, clutching at Hope and Mercy, listening to the sirens growing louder. It was tempting to let the police deal with the robot, but they were human and they would likely get themselves hurt, maybe even killed. There were already fifteen boys and one Chemistry teacher in that room who couldn't even hope to be able to protect themselves. And Jules was strong, but that strength had already begun fading when Johnny had been unceremoniously ejected from the lab. He probably wouldn't be able to fight quite as well as he thought he could.

That thought was the only thing that gave Johnny enough strength to let go of Hope and Mercy's hands and super-speed back though the school. The scar of his exit was clearly carved on the walls and floors, but there would be time enough to worry about what that might mean for him later. After Jules was safe. He had no doubts that Lex could make it seem like nothing had ever happened, and make people believe it as well.

The door to the lab had twisted on its hinges and he had to wrench it open, tearing the wood like paper. He threw the broken pieces aside, and readied himself for attack.

It didn't come.

He edged forward cautiously. The air inside the lab stank of urine and terror, but it was quiet save for the small, wretched sound of someone praying for God to spare them.

"You're still alive, Kent," Mr. Martin said disbelievingly, poking his head out from beneath the scant cover of his desk. "Don't get too close to that hole. That thing seems to have gone for the time being, but it could return at any moment. It's already taken Luthor, and -"

If Mr. Martin said anything else, then Johnny didn't hear it. He crept to the edge of the now-empty hole, his feet splayed in effort to keep his balance on the uneven floor, and peered into it. He couldn't see its bottom, but he could see something caught on a jagged outcrop of rock several feet down, glinting under the fluorescent lights. It was the twisted frames of Jules' glasses. The heat of Johnny's anger and fear was washed away by cold resolve. He couldn't wait for the police or the Justice League, even though he knew that they were probably already on their way. Jules needed him.

He bent his knees and readied himself.

"Are you mad?" Mr. Martin almost screamed. "You can't go after him. Did you see the size of that thing? It'll kill you."

Johnny jumped.

The light filtering through the hole from the lab high above Johnny's head did little to penetrate the darkness, but it was enough to see that the ground before him sloped steeply downwards, and that he could touch both sides of the tunnel he'd found himself in if he held his arms out to his sides. There was no way of knowing where the tunnel might lead.

"Kent, are you okay?" Mr. Martin's worried voice drifted down the hole. "I can hear sirens; the police must be on their way. If you stay where you are, they should be able to get you out of there."

A few short strides took Johnny to the edge of the circle of light, and he stood there for a moment, contemplating his next move. It would be more sensible to go slowly as the tunnel's floor was rough and strewn with rocks, and there was no telling how tortuous its route might be. Johnny's night vision was no better than a normal human's, and he was just likely to lose his footing or take a wrong turning.

"Kent, can you hear me?"

But the robots had Jules and Johnny couldn't afford to take it slowly, couldn't afford to be sensible. Jennings could have Jules.

"Kent, can you -"

Johnny put his head down and ran. He struggled to hit his stride at first, and for a while he stumbled almost as often as he found a firm footing, but when he finally managed to reach somewhere near his top speed, his feet barely touched the floor and he was flying as much as running. Mr. Martin's voice grew fainter until it disappeared completely, replaced by the dull whistle of stale air rushing past Johnny's ears.

For a moment, Johnny was aware of nothing else but the repeated bunch and stretch of the long muscles in his thighs and the beating of his heart; the only thing he had to measure time and distance by in the featureless dark. After twenty heartbeats, the floor began to level out, becoming more secure underfoot, and the blackness became less absolute, lightening towards a dusky grey.

He reduced his speed to a steady jog then, taking stock of his surroundings. The tunnel was wider here and the jagged rock of the walls became smoother, finally replaced altogether by dark tiles at the very limit of Johnny's vision. There was a bare bulb set into the tiled portion, and the heavy bars of the cage protecting it blocked most of its meagre light, striping the floor with deeper shadows.

Johnny gradually slowed his jog to a walk and then finally stopped as the dirt of the floor shifted into a brushed-metal walkway. The latter part of the tunnel, that which led into the Chemistry lab at Centennial Park, had clearly been carved by the robot's passage as it moved through the ground, but this must have been where it started out. Someone, most probably Jennings, had built this place and it was unlikely that it wouldn't be protected in some way. Johnny suspected that Jennings was already aware of his presence, or at least very soon would be.

Johnny stepped onto the walkway carefully, wincing at the sharp clang that the hard soles of his school shoes made as they contacted the metal despite the softness of his tread. The sound bounced off the tiles, its echoes seeming to grow even louder as they raced along the narrow confines of the tunnel. Johnny waited breathlessly in the ringing silence that followed, sure that an alarm would be activated or that one of Jennings' robots would be attracted by the noise.

He counted twenty more heartbeats, eyes and ears straining for any sign of movement, but nothing changed. Everything was quiet and still.

Cautiously, he started walking again. There was no way that Jennings wouldn't know that he was coming now, if he was listening out for it, but Johnny couldn't let that fear give him pause. Any delay just increased the chance that something might happen to Jules. If it came to it, Johnny would fight anything that Jennings sent his way; fight it and win. He could be strong enough.

The caged bulbs gave way to strip-lights that hung from the ceiling as the tunnel widened yet further, leading into an enormous, but mercifully empty, room. The puddles of oil that had collected on the floor and the scorch marks that blackened the high ceiling suggested that something had once occupied it, but of whatever that might have been, there was no sign.

Johnny edged around the room slowly, his back pressed against the wall, making his way towards the huge metal door that marked the only visible exit from the room. He half-expected it to swing open, disgorging an army of robots sent to destroy him, and when it didn't, Johnny found himself hoping for something to happen. Some sign that he was unwelcome here, because he was beginning to have the uncomfortable feeling that this was all too easy, that he was being led wherever it was that Jennings wanted him to go.

Or even worse than that, that Jennings might not care that he was there at all because he'd already moved on. Moved on and taken Jules with him.

The feeling intensified as neared the door and his hand closed around the control that he was sure must open it. It was a simple lever unprotected even the most rudimentary and commonplace of security measures that the majority people had on their front doors, like a retina or fingerprint scanner. It had felt wrong enough when it was just Lex's laptop, and it felt doubly so now. Even more like a trap.

Jennings was unlikely to let Johnny leave the way he'd come and that meant that the only way was forwards. If it was a trap, Johnny reasoned, then at least he and Jules would be in it together and they would find a way to break free of it somehow.

Johnny pulled the lever and the door slid back silently, despite its size.

He stepped through the door onto a metal gantry that bordered the upper limits of a room even more enormous than the one that he'd just left. The tiles there were white and harshly reflective, making every detail of the scene below him painfully clear.

The robot standing in the centre of the room was easily the biggest of Jennings' creations that Johnny had ever seen. It was even bigger than Goliath and the tips of its outstretched wings scraped against the walls as it shifted slowly. Just below the wings, two long arms were attached to its body; arms that had snatched Jules from school and thrown Johnny so easily. They were quiescent now, arranged in neat coils on the floor in front of the robot, framing Jules' still body.

Jules had brought his knees up to his chest and clasped his hands over the top of his head, as if he were trying to make himself as small as possible. The pool of blood that he was lying in seemed too vivid a red to be real.

"I know that you're here. I'm almost disappointed that you didn't even try to disguise your presence. I was expecting a futile game of cat and mouse, but if you prefer the more direct route, who am I to deny you?" The voice seemed to come from the robot itself and sounded dryly amused. "Why don't you come down here and join me? I'm sure you're just as eager to put an end to all of this as I am myself." The robot raised one arm slightly and raked a claw through Jules tangled hair in a parody of a caress. "Come on now, all I have to do is apply a little more pressure and I crush his skull. Do you honestly believe that he heals quickly enough to survive that? Do you believe in it strongly enough to stake his life on it?"

The claw tightened around Jules' face, slicing across the pale skin of his cheek from just below his right eye to the corner of his lax mouth. Jules did not stir and Johnny clambered onto the railing of the gantry, jumping before he gave himself chance to wonder whether he had any chance at all against a robot this size. He didn't have time to wonder or reconsider his choice of action, because Jules might not have stirred, but blood was welling in the cut on his face, which meant that he was still alive. Alive, but evidently deeply unconscious and unable to use his powers. Helpless.

Johnny flew a quick loop around the first arm, dodging it easily, but the second took him by surprise, slamming into his solar plexus and knocking the air out of his lungs. He landed heavily, flat on his back and gasping, but managed to twist out of the way as the first arm shot towards him again. It hit the floor where his head had been, smashing the tiles into powder beneath it.

"I wasn't expecting you." The voice had lost all traces of amusement. "I was expecting this one's father."

"Oh, he's on his way. He's following right behind me," Johnny said, pushing himself up onto his knees with shaking arms that felt as though they barely hold his weight. If he could keep Jennings talking, it would give him chance to find some sort of weakness in Jennings' defence. His dad always said that there wasn't a super-villain alive who would pass up the opportunity to expound at length about the poor hand that fate had dealt them, no matter how close they might be to victory.

"Liar!" One of the arms snaked around Johnny's ankles, winding so tightly that it was actually painful, and yanked him off the floor. It lifted him until he was level with the robot's head. "He's as much of a coward as I always knew him to be, sending a child in his place."

The robot's eyes seemed to be lit from within, which made the smoked glass slightly translucent, and Johnny could see the vague shape of a man's body beyond them. He was certain that it was Jennings. If he'd planned this to be a battle against Lex, the culmination of the war he'd waged against him, then he wouldn't have wanted anyone else to be in control of the robot.

"Nobody sent me, Dr. Jennings," Johnny said, looking straight at Jennings through the glass, and hoping their eyes met. "You took my best friend from right in front of me. You hurt him. I couldn't just sit there and do nothing."

"He's not worth it, boy," Jennings spat, lowering the robot's other arm so that it draped across Jules' hunched body once again. "Luthor killed eight of the best scientists I've ever worked with to keep his origins a secret. He destroyed my life's work, all of my research, because of him." The claws brushed back and forth across Jules' throat meditatively. "Do you even know what he is?"

There was a small doorway in the wall behind the bulk of the robotic exoskeleton; it kept coming into Johnny's line of sight as he swung uselessly from side to side in Jennings' grasp. If he could reach it, then Jennings' couldn't follow, or not easily, at least. All he had to do was break free, grab Jules, and then... Jennings would never let him grab Jules. Johnny didn't know if he could be quick enough to reach his friend before Jennings slit his throat as he obviously wanted to.

"He's my best friend, that's all I care about," Johnny said, playing for time and hoping a plan, or at least an opportunity, presented itself. "And why Lex might have made him in the first place doesn't matter, because he loves him."

"If you knew what Luthor had us do to him when he was a baby, you wouldn't believe that. The tests that he made Nate and me run on him late at night when the lab was empty. I know Nate still has nightmares about them. Luthor needs to pay for everything he did to us. All of us." Jennings lowered Johnny towards Jules, but not close enough that Johnny could touch him, even with his fingers stretched out as straight as he could make them. "Luthor might have had second thoughts about what he was going to do with the child, but that doesn't change what he is. What he was made to be."

"And that is?" Johnny found that he could move his legs a little in his new position. Perhaps if he kicked out with enough force, he could break free of Jennings? He was only a few feet from the floor now and, if he moved quickly enough, he could probably fall straight on top of Jules and shield him from Jennings' inevitable attack.

"He's dangerous. I don't think that even Luthor knows just how dangerous he is. Or he simply chooses not to acknowledge it. I'm sorry for what we did to him, but it's too late now. That child was made as a weapon and that's what he'll grow up to be if I don't stop him." Jennings chuckled roughly. "God's sake, boy, he's not even fully human. Did you know that?"

Jules had never mentioned that, never even hinted at it, and Johnny had to wonder if Jules knew it himself. "So what," Johnny said, ignoring the bolt of pain that raced along his leg as he bent his knee, reading himself to strike. "Neither am I."

Jennings' chuckle grew into deep, full-throated laughter. "Do you think I don't know that? I've been watching Luthor for years as I prepared for this. Luthor and everyone important to him. I know exactly what you are."

As Jennings lifted Johnny up and away from Jules again, a small hatch in the middle of the robot's torso opened with a barely audible click, spilling out a noxious green light. Johnny retched, every muscle in his body going into spasm and then relaxing just as suddenly, leaving his limbs heavy and useless.

"I know exactly how to deal with you, and your father," Jennings continued as he pulled Johnny towards him. Towards the kryptonite's pitiless radiation. "I even know that you have much less protection against this rock than he does. I'm almost certain that actual contact with it will kill you."

Sharp pain sliced through Johnny's head, making his vision explode into whiteness. If he died now, then Jules would soon follow and, no doubt, Jennings wouldn't stop until he'd killed Lex too. There was no telling how many people he would hurt along the way before he reached his goal. The pain in Johnny's head intensified and spread until it felt as if his brain was on fire with it.

He would have laughed then, if he'd been able to find the breath to do so. Here was his opportunity at last.

He concentrated on the feeling, forcing it forwards as his dad had taught him to, until bright red flashes danced across the blank void in front of his eyes. And then he let go.

It hurt just as much as it ever did, almost as much as the kryptonite, but Johnny didn't try to stop it. He poured all of his hatred for Jennings into it, wanting to hurt him as much as he was hurting, and for everything he'd done to the people of Metropolis and all of the other cities that he'd terrorised. And, selfishly, wanting to hurt him for what he'd almost done to Johnny's family and, especially, Jules.

Jennings yelled, a wordless sound of fear and anger, and the robot's arm loosened its hold on Johnny's legs, dropping him to the floor. The kryptonite's power seemed diminished there, and Johnny found that he could move more easily and that the pain receded slightly. He didn't know whether that was because he'd gotten further away from the rock or because he'd damaged it in some way, but he did know that this was his chance.

He crawled forward, hands groping blindly for Jules until the tips of his fingers brushed coarse, damp fabric, and then soft, mercifully warm, skin. He shuffled closer until his chest was flush against Jules' back and then wrapped his arms around Jules' waist.

"Jules," Johnny whispered, wary of Jennings' notice, although Jennings probably couldn't hear anything above his own screams, "don't be scared. I'm going to get you out of here." Jules didn't answer, and his head lolled back against Johnny's shoulder as Johnny struggled to his feet. "We're going to be okay."

Johnny's sight was always slow to clear after he'd used his heat vision, and he couldn't see the doorway that he'd noticed earlier. He could hardly see Jennings' robot despite its size, it was little more than a darker blur in the haze before his eyes, truly visible only when it moved. He could hear it, though, thrashing around as if in its death throes. He didn't dare hope that it was close to death, or at least malfunction, however. Jennings' robots had never been easy to defeat and he'd probably just wounded it. And pissed Jennings off.

Johnny settled Jules' weight more evenly in his arms - he was quickly discovering that his friend was remarkably heavy while his strength was still compromised by the effects of the kryptonite - and began to sidle towards where he thought that the door should be. As long as he hadn't gotten too turned around when he fell.

"You are not going to take him away from me." Jennings angry roar made Johnny believe that he was indeed heading in the right direction. "I've waited too long for this. You have no idea what -"

Johnny squared his shoulders, and ran at the wall as fast as he could. He turned at the last minute and hit it hard with his back and elbows, moulding the rest of his body around Jules to shield him. The impact jarred him and for a terrible moment he thought that it hadn't been enough, that he hadn't been fast enough or strong enough to break through.

But it was only for a moment, before the reinforced concrete groaned and then crumbled behind him, and he fell with it onto the cool, tiled floor of the room beyond. He didn't pause to dust himself off or try and get his bearings, just dragged himself and Jules as far away from the hole that he'd made as quickly as possible.

Jennings roar held a note of triumph this time. "You're still weak, Superboy, and I know just how long it takes you to recover." One of the robot's arms appeared briefly at the hole, sifting through the debris, and then it was gone. "You'll never find your way out in time."

Johnny knew that he should try and move further into the new room, out of the range of the robot's arms, if that were even possible, but he was too exhausted. His back ached and there was a sore spot on his side that felt raw and exposed in a way that he hadn't experienced since he was a little kid. The thin cotton of his shirt above the spot felt unpleasantly wet and kept sticking to his skin. Johnny didn't know if it was his blood or Jules' that was soaking it and he didn't care to check.

All he wanted to do was sleep or at least rest for a little while and recuperate. He was no use to Jules like this; barely able to use his powers. He let himself relax slightly, resting his chin against the top of Jules' head and closing his stinging eyes. If Jennings' only gave them a minute or two of respite it might be enough, they might be able to -

A strong hand clasped Johnny's shoulder, its cold metallic fingers digging into his flesh.

Johnny tried to stand, but the hand pushed him down, before sliding from his shoulder and moving up to touch his cheek almost tenderly. Johnny flinched, grabbing at it and trying to push it away from his skin, but it remained firm. He clenched his other hand into a fist, but he was too slow and clumsy in swinging it and it was caught and held fast before his punch could connect.

"Johnny, it's okay. It's me. It's Lex." The voice sounded like Lex's, but Johnny didn't doubt that Jennings had access to technology that could make his robots sound like anyone he wanted them to. He couldn't drop his guard.

He squinted at the hand covering his own and he could see only vague details at first: the deep purple colour of the metal, the thickness of the fingers, the row of angular depressions that ran across the knuckles that looked as if they might once have held faceted stones of some kind. His gaze travelled up the length of the outstretched arm to the bulky green chest plate and then up once again to the pale shape of a face whose features he couldn't quite distinguish, but which was unmistakably human.

"Lex? I thought you were one of Jennings' robots," Johnny couldn't quite believe that that it really was Lex. It seemed too good to be true; the answer to some fervent wish he hadn't been aware of making. "What on earth are you wearing?"

"Apokoliptian battle armour," Lex said with a small chuckle. "I retired it some time ago after I was... persuaded that I would have no further use for it but, given the present circumstances, it seemed prudent to retrieve it from storage. My scientists have been working around the clock, modifying it for just this eventuality."

"You're going to try and fight Jennings?" Johnny asked, trying to rise again. Lex stilled him easily. "You can't, Lex. He's far too powerful. The robot that he's controlling is enormous, and -"

"The strength of this armour isn't my only protection, Johnny." Lex lifted his hand from Johnny's shoulder and held it close to Johnny's eyes, spreading his fingers wide. There was a raised circle in the centre of his armoured palm which reflected the dim light strangely. "Do you remember me telling you that my scientists had devised a weapon that could disable Jennings' robots? This armour now contains that weapon.

"Besides, I won't be fighting him alone. Clark has assured me that the JLA are on their way, and he refused to let me come on my own. He just had to make a small detour in order to deal with some of Jennings' more persistent security features, but I shouldn't think they'll delay him for long."

"I'll come with you," Johnny said. "I can help."

He was nowhere near his full strength, but he thought that he'd still have a better chance against Jennings than Lex. He'd never seen Lex use a weapon more dangerous than a fencing foil, and although he sometimes achieved the impressive feat of pinning Hope during their sparring sessions, it just couldn't compare to what he would face in the room beyond.

"This isn't your fight, Johnny. I created this situation and it's only right that I should be the one who deals with it." Lex sighed tiredly. "I'm sorry that you and Jules ever became involved."

Lex's hands moved to Jules then, running lightly over his prone form and then coming to rest on his chest as if checking for a heartbeat he couldn't possibly feel through the thick metal of his gauntlets. "This never should have happened," he said coldly. "Jennings should be thankful that Clark came with me, because I'm not sure if I could stop myself from killing him if I got the chance otherwise."

Johnny couldn't bring himself to be as shocked as he thought he should be by Lex's admission. There was a small part of him that wanted Jennings dead for what he'd done, that wished for a swifter kind of justice than a trial and subsequent incarceration would bring, even though he knew that was a path which a superhero could never walk.

"Yeah, I can understand that," he said, placing his hands either side of Lex's own seeking a reassurance in the strong beating of Jules' heart that Lex couldn't offer him. "Is he hurt? I can't see well enough to check and he was... There was a lot of blood."

Lex inhaled sharply and bowed his head over Jules. His hands started moving once again, but with an urgency that had been lacking earlier. "I can't see any obvious wounds, apart from the cut on his face," he said after a moment, his voice light with relief. "Perhaps it wasn't his blood?"

Johnny couldn't see who else's blood it could have been, but it seemed pointless to speculate. The only important thing was that Jules wasn't as badly wounded as Johnny had feared him to be. "Maybe not," he said.

"Nevertheless, I think it's best if we get him out of here as quickly as possible." Lex got to his feet and then helped Johnny to his. "I'll be much happier knowing you're both far away from here." Lex placed his hands on Johnny's shoulders again and turned him around. "The tunnel to the north emerges in Centennial Park, close to your school. If everything is going to plan, then the JLA should already be congregating there, and they'll be able to -"

"Lex, you could have warned me that that thing had a laser mounted on it," Johnny's dad said, appearing at Lex's side in a swirl of red and blue. He stank of smoke and machine oil. "I could have..." Johnny didn't hear his dad move, but he found himself suddenly caught up in a rough embrace, his face pressed hard against his dad's broad chest. "God, son, are you okay? What did that bastard do to you?"

"I'm fine, Dad." Johnny returned the hug only briefly, stepping back before he was crushed. He'd never realised quite how strong his dad was before. "Jennings knows who I am, who we both are, so he had some kryptonite ready. I used my heat vision on him and I think I might have damaged it, but I can't be sure. I'm feeling a lot stronger now, though," he lied.

"Kryptonite," Lex said in evident alarm. "Clark, maybe it would be best if you go back with the boys and make sure they get out safely. I can wait until one of the other members of the JLA arrives before confronting Jennings."

Johnny knew that they would be able to escape a lot more quickly if his dad was with them - he could carry both Jules and Johnny easily, and he could run faster than Johnny could ever hope to, even when his powers were functioning normally - but he didn't think it was a particularly good idea. He doubted that Lex would wait for backup if his dad did leave and he could get himself killed or, perhaps worse, he might kill Jennings as he wanted to if he didn't have Johnny's dad by his side to stay his hand. Johnny didn't think that Lex would be able to forgive himself if that happened, no matter how he might feel now.

"You should stay with Lex, Dad," Johnny said quietly. "I think he needs you more than I do right now."

Johnny's dad squeezed Johnny's arm gently. "I know that was probably a difficult decision to make, Johnny, but I think it was the right one."

"As do I," Lex said gruffly. "Though it's not one that I think I could have made myself." He cleared his throat before continuing: "I think we've waited long enough, Johnny. You should get moving. I'm surprised that Jennings has allowed us this much of a breathing space and I can't imagine it means anything good."

Finally, Johnny had to admit that he needed to rest. Jules seemed to be doubling in weight with every step Johnny took and he could barely hold him anymore. He placed Jules down carefully onto the floor before he dropped him and then sank down beside his friend, stretching out his legs and letting his weary body sag against the wall behind him. Every part of him seemed to ache, even the roots of his hair, and for the first time in his life he was thankful that he wasn't human. At least he knew that he would feel like his normal self in a couple of hours.

He could hear the distant sounds of violence, of metal striking metal, and the floor bucked and trembled beneath him, but he didn't think he'd be able to return to the fight even if he'd wanted to. He was just too tired, too drained, and he suspected that his presence would be more of a hindrance than a help.

He was so absorbed by the unfamiliar feel of his own body and with the battle that he wasn't a part of, that he didn't realise that it really was Jules' voice calling his name until he said it for the third time.

"I thought you'd gone to sleep." Jules grinned wryly as he sat up, rubbing at the back of his head. "Care to tell me what the hell's happening? I appear to have a gap in my memory yet again. And Dad promised me that the tendency towards developing amnesia at the drop of a hat wasn't hereditary," he grumbled.

"God, I've never been so happy to hear you complaining before," Johnny said, flinging his arms around his friend before he had a chance to say another word, his tiredness forgotten. "Jennings brought you here from school, but I came after you, got you away from him. Dad, Lex, and what sounds like the entire Justice League are busy kicking his ass right now, and I'm supposed to get us out of here. I didn't think you'd be regaining consciousness any time soon, though. How do you feel?"

Johnny didn't care exactly why it was that Jules always recovered so quickly from his injuries - whether it was simply the mutation that he'd inherited from Lex or a consequence of the unusual parentage Jennings had hinted at - he was glad for it. He was selfishly glad that he didn't have to wait and worry and pray for a recovery as other people did.

"I feel fine, if a little light-headed," Jules replied with a shrug. "My face is stinging like a bitch, though. Did I get cut or something?"

"Yeah, from here" - Johnny rested his finger just below Jules' right eye and then ran it along the curve of Jules' cheek, following the line of the cut that Jennings had made - "to here. It doesn't seem too deep. In fact, I think it's already started healing." Johnny pressed his fingertip lightly against the smooth new skin that had formed on Jules' top lip.

Jules shivered. "Do you think it'll scar?" he asked, his voice low and husky. His eyes seemed unnaturally dark, their pupils blown. "I've always thought that a facial scar makes a man look very dashing."

"You don't scar, do you?" Johnny asked, even though he wasn't really interested in Jules' reply. He was far more interested in the heat of Jules' skin beneath his hand. He leaned in a little closer.

He half-wished that Jules would just move or say something to discourage him, anything at all, because it had been difficult enough not kissing Jules when Lex had been there, but there was nothing stopping him now. Nothing except Jules himself.

Jules didn't move, and he remained silent.

Johnny leaned in yet further and Jules' eyes darted away from his nervously. "Johnny, I don't think..." His voice trailed into silence and he licked his lips.

Johnny expected Jules to ask him to stop as he closed the gap between them, but he didn't. He was completely immobile as Johnny pressed their lips together, but his breathing speeded up, became harsher. He passively allowed the kiss for a moment, but then he placed his hand flat against Johnny's chest and pushed him back with an almost pained-sounding groan.

Johnny was disgusted with himself. Jules was weak, probably disoriented, and Johnny shouldn't have taken advantage of that. Jules had never given him any indication that he was interested and there was no guarantee that Jules would be as understanding as Johnny had been with Robin when this situation had been reversed. He could have just fucked up the friendship he'd only just regained.

"I'm so sorry, Jules," he said, willing his friend to believe him. "I shouldn't have done that. You must think... I can't... Shit, I'm sorry."

Jules grabbed the back of Johnny's head as he shuffled backwards, threading his fingers through Johnny's hair and holding him in place. "God, you can be so dense," Jules said as he pressed their foreheads together. "I don't know what I see in you sometimes."

He kissed Johnny softly before drawing back. His eyes were wide and scared-looking, as though he wasn't sure if he'd done the right thing; if Johnny really wanted him to reciprocate. His fingers loosened in Johnny's hair and he ducked his head, but not quickly enough that Johnny didn't notice the slow blush that spread across his cheeks.

He opened his mouth as if to speak, probably to apologise as Johnny had done, but Johnny kissed him again before he had the chance to. Kissed him until he could feel Jules' lips curve upwards into a smile which finally dissolved into shaky laughter as the floor shook again and a light shower of earth fell from the ceiling, dusting them both.

"Much as I'd like to continue," Jules said, breaking the kiss and resting his forehead against Johnny's again, "I think that we'd better get out of here before the whole place collapses on top of us."

Johnny thought that it was unfair that Jules had to pick this particular time to suddenly become the voice of reason, but he had to concede that he had a point. That didn't mean that he had to be happy about it though. He scowled at Jules as he helped him to his feet, but Jules only rolled his eyes and didn't rise to the bait.

Jules didn't seem to be able to find his balance and he swayed a little, catching at Johnny's sleeve. "I'm not sure I can walk right now, Johnny. It seems that all the blood has rushed from my head." His expression hardened when Johnny smirked and he added: "Because I stood up too quickly. I got dizzy because I stood up too quickly."

Johnny chuckled and held his arms out towards Jules. "I can carry you if you like." It would be a struggle, but Johnny wasn't about to mention just how heavy Jules was. He suspected that Jules never wanting to kiss him again would probably be the best outcome if he did.

"I don't think that would be a very good idea," Jules said, his blush darkening slightly. "Besides, you don't look any better than I feel. Here," he looped his arm around Johnny's waist, "we can lean on each other."

Jules' fingers brushed against the raw spot on Johnny's side as he tried to find a secure place to anchor his hand, and he flinched when Johnny hissed in pain.

"You're bleeding," he said questioningly. "What happened? Why the hell are you bleeding?"

"I think I caught myself on something sharp when I busted us out of the room Jennings was keeping you in. It's only a scratch," Johnny said, trying to sound blas, as if cutting himself was something that happened every day, and not something terrifying that he hadn't had to endure since he was eight years old. "Once the after-effects from the kryptonite wear off, I'm sure I'll heal just as quickly as you."

Jules didn't look convinced, and he moved around to Johnny's wounded side, clinging to Johnny all the while for support. He unbuttoned Johnny's shirt quickly, but Johnny didn't even have the chance to enjoy the experience as Jules' reddened face drained of all colour and he swayed again.

"Is it that bad?" he asked, aiming for levity and missing by a country mile.

"It's deep, John, really deep." Jules' fingers trembled as he pushed the sodden fabric of Johnny's shirt aside. "Shit, it would have punctured your lung if it had been just a little bit higher. You were fucking lucky, you could have..." Jules blinked rapidly and then sniffed, obviously fighting tears. "It was stupid and reckless to come after me on your own. You must have known that Dad would have some sort of plan."

"I couldn't wait, Jules. I couldn't take that chance," Johnny said. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat, and don't give me that crap about being reckless because I know that you'd do the same for me."

"Always," Jules said, his voice little more than a whisper. It made Johnny want to kiss him again, but Jules refused to lift his head, his eyes remaining doggedly fixed on Johnny's side. "I couldn't bear to lose you. I don't know what I'd do if I did. You have to promise me that you'll be more careful in the future."

"I will," Johnny said, knowing even as he made the promise that he'd break it as soon as he thought Jules' life might be in danger again. He settled for kissing the top of Jules' head and Jules sighed, leaning into him a little.

"Hopefully, you're right and you'll heal when your powers come back," Jules said. "If not, then I suppose there's always the chance that Batman's got some kryptonite-tipped needles or something else we can use to stitch you up."

"Are you sure you're okay, Jules?" Johnny asked, the talk of his own injuries making him remember the pool of blood that he'd found Jules' lying in and then immediately wish he hadn't. "You seemed to have bled a lot when I found you, but your dad couldn't find a mark on you apart from the cut on your face."

A fine tremor raced through Jules' body, one that Johnny was sure that he would have missed if he hadn't been holding the other boy so closely.

"I must have had a nosebleed or something," Jules said without hesitation, his voice flat and calm. "I'm sure it's nothing to worry about." He looked up at Johnny and offered him a lopsided grin. "Come on, we should get moving. While I have every confidence that there isn't a being alive that could withstand a combined attack by Lex Luthor and Superman, I'd really rather put as much distance between Jennings and us as possible."

Johnny thought that there was no way that Jules had lost all that blood through something as simple as a nosebleed, but if Jules didn't want to talk about it, then he wasn't going to keep pushing and he let Jules set their pace as they started walking. For now, Johnny was just happy that he and Jules were alive and that Jennings would soon be facing the punishment he so richly deserved, if he wasn't already receiving at least part of it. He was happy that the tunnel was obviously beginning to climb steeply and each step that they took them closer to the surface: there was a hazy light cutting through the gloom in the middle distance which promised open skies and freedom.

There would be time enough to talk to Jules later and time enough to worry about the very real danger that Jennings could still pose to them from behind bars, knowing what he knew. But there would also be time to start rebuilding everything Jennings had destroyed, for Johnny to try and settle into his new life a little better than he had in the past, and, hopefully, time enough to kiss his best friend some more without the threat of being crushed hanging over their heads.

On balance, Johnny thought that the future looked pretty good.