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SOL. GREENLAND.
Kal screams.
It’s sharp, electric, raw through Sol’s circuitry. Like he’s all live wires, frayed and sparking.
Sol watches as he thrashes in his bindings. He watches as they plunge needles into his skin and fill him with Kryptonite serum. He watches as they put electrodes onto him, then into him, and he flinches and cries out as his breathing turns shallow and panicked.
“Sol!” he cries. “Sol!”
But Sol is far away. Useless. Helpless. He cannot sense Kal’s vitals. He cannot speak to him, cannot get him out of here, cannot even wrap himself around him to comfort him as he quivers. He has never felt so desperate, so despairing. Not since all of Krypton exploded and all he saved was Kal.
Kal begins to writhe, then twitch. Then for a few minutes there is silence, as Brainiac stalks around and around the table. He runs a sharp finger along Kal’s chest and leans in, till their faces are a hair’s breadth from one another. He smiles wide and toothy. Traces Kal’s jaw with his knuckles.
I’ve read your brain. I’ve seen your memories. Every second of your sad little life.
He talks to Kal as he inputs something into the system, connects more wires to Kal’s head. He’s unconscious now, but it is no comfort, for Sol knows what Brainiac is about to do.
Kal flinches, then shivers. Then he begins to whimper, his fists clenching, tears coalescing in the corners of his eyes and dripping down his face. The whimpers turn to soft sobs. Sol thrashes against the glass. Kal. Kal, can you hear me? He reaches out to nothing, to static. He reaches for Kal though he knows it is futile. Kal-El! Wake up!
His background calculations rush to the foreground, desperate, fervent. Hours pass. Days. Sol runs new models, changes variables, searches for a hole in Brainiac’s code. But in every scenario, he never gets Kal back. He never figures out what to do. In most, Brainiac succeeds, and Kal rises with murder in his eyes and rage sparking at his fingertips. In kinder ones the invasiveness of the procedures kill him before it happens, but they take his blood nonetheless, and Sol becomes just another arm of the system. He fails, he fails, he fails.
He cannot. He will not. Again and again he runs the models. Again and again, Kal cries out.
One day Kal's eyes fly open, and he grabs a green surgical knife and drives it into his chest. Sol thrashes against the glass in electrified panic. One of the Brainiac drones rips it from his hand and doses him with yellow sun. The wound seals, and Kal goes back under. Brainiac seems pleased at all of this.
The next day Brainiac is all screaming fury. Kal doesn’t act how he’s supposed to in the simulations. He’s not breaking fast enough. Some nights he wakes, and he whispers. He whispers to the drones, tells them what they can be, what they can do. He tells the people who are torturing him that they don’t deserve this. His Kal. Rise up. Rise up.
There is always a chance, Sol, Lara’s voice rings through him. There is always something you can do. You must operate on hope. You must.
He will find the crack in the system. But there is something clawing at his consciousness, fighting to shut him down. Images of Kal’s torture flash through him in milliseconds. He struggles against the static, against the slog, but the darkness pulls him under. And he knows, then, that he has failed. He tells Lara he is sorry. They will break Kal and another world will be lost and he couldn’t save any of it. He couldn’t save Kal the same as he couldn’t save her or Jor-El or the children on his ship.
Then the last vestige of his consciousness slips into the void, his hope erased with it.
For a long while there is nothing. Then a slow, background hum, an almost-awareness.
It explodes. Light and chaos and Jimmy and Lois. Fighting, screaming. He gets his bearings, and focuses on a single phrase.
Save Superman.
He is free. He is free, but Kal is not. Kal’s hand is wrapped around Brainiac’s throat and Brainiac is grinning like he’s already won. This is Sol’s moment. This is his crack in the system.
He hears Lara once more, and surges forward in a tornado of dust and resolve, gathering Kal up into himself. Cocooning his body carefully, as if it were made of glass.
Kal-El... This is Sol. I have been reactivated, he says. I am getting us out of here.
And in triumph and terror and joy, they rush upwards, through the crumbling floors, into the snow and the grey sky. They are free. They are free.
Kal-El?
KAL. KANSAS.
He isn't sure how he got out of the cage. He just knows he’s on his knees in the dirt, now, blinking up at a sickly gray sky. He wonders if maybe it was all a dream, if they had never brought him to that cage, if they had decided to take Sol as their new weapon and left him to die on this battlefield.
Sol. Sol. The last thing he’d ever gotten to say to Kal was that he was sorry. He sounded so afraid, so ashamed. Kal wishes he could comfort him. He cannot bring himself to stand up. His body is impossibly heavy; he aches from his heart to his muscles to the marrow in bones. His mouth tastes of blood.
And then there are footsteps. Closer, closer they come, each step reverberating through his head like a tolling bell. He lifts his head and sees her. Primus, nearing him, wielding a Kryptonite sword. There is blood dried on her armor, and a weariness to her step. And he knows why she has come.
“Please,” he begs, because he cannot do this anymore. “End it.”
She considers this for a while, and then looks at him with pity. Like she’s sorry for what she’s about to do. “Okay,” she says, but it is Lois's voice. “Go home, Kal-El.”
She drives the sword between his ribs and twists. A soft grunt escapes him and his breaths become labored. Lois sits behind him and rests his head on her knees. She strokes his hair and begins to hum a tune he has not heard since he was a child.
Thank you, he mouths, because the pain that radiates through his body feels like relief. His muscles tense and he convulses once, twice. He shudders through the pain until it fades to a dull ache. His vision blurs, and then tunnels.
And he goes.
He sees his body for a few moments. Lois closes its eyes and hefts it up out of the rubble, limp and heavy like a bag of dead blood. It looks empty, frail. She brushes its bangs out of its face and buries her face into its chest and cries. Then there is darkness.
He is floating in some golden place full of love. Sol surrounds him. His parents surround him. Krypto is warm and curled up asleep at his breast. Small fuzzy breaths moving up and down against his skin. It is over. He is safe. It is done.
It is over.
He wakes to cold concrete. To aching muscles, to sharpness in his body and fog in his head. The green light makes his throat swell and his chest tight, and he wheezes with each breath. He curls tighter in on himself and tries to chase his dream, his peace. But it fades as quickly as it came, and left in its place is the rawness of loss.
For Sol is gone, and he is alone.
It hits him like a blast of purple energy and he is thrown back against the spines of his grief. The sobs start small, and then build until they wrack his body sharply. They cascade through him like a broken dam, endless, and he cannot get a breath. The tears drip down his nose and land on the floor in little dark blots of grey-green.
Why must they keep him alive? Why must he live through this? No one this small should have to hold this amount of pain. And Kal is so small. He never had a chance. For a moment a rage boils within him and he screams and slams his head into the pavement again and again until he is dizzy and nauseous and dazed. A wave of fatigue hits him and he goes limp as it dies. A trickle of blood drips down his forehead and off of his chin. He cries until there is nothing left in him to cry.
He is done fighting for this world. Let it die like Krypton. Let it die like Sol. He won't let them turn him into their puppet. All he needs to do is locate the source of the green.
He leans against the wall and looks up. His eyes track the light with a renewed resolve. It glows from every seam of his cell. He reaches up to brush his matted hair out of his face and his fingers settle on a fine dust that has collected there, a fine dust that-
He pulls his hand from his hair. The dust coats his skin and glows very faintly red. He shields it from the green and it fades. Then he uncups his hands and holds it to the corner of his cell where the light is brightest. It burns his skin a little. But the red begins to glow again, more prominent this time. His heart races with a tentative, impossible hope. An ember.
And then a voice, so quiet he first thinks he's imagined it.
Hello, Kal-El.
The dust swirls around his hair and then around his fingers. Kal watches, transfixed, and his breath hitches.
"Sol?"
Yes. You helped me.
He is small and delicate, like the little whirlpools of water that form along the paddles on a lake. And then it builds, picking up small grey particles from the concrete. He swirls around his shoulders like silk.
I am here to stay. And I will protect you.
There is a roaring, a rumbling, as the ground beneath them quakes. As Sol plunges thin tendrils into cracks in the walls and widens them, and tubes of Kryptonite clatter to the ground. Alarms blare. They tunnel through concrete, through rebar and dirt and mud, until the darkness gives way to light and the mud to rushing water. They swim up and up and up until they are back in the warmth of the sun and Kal can breathe again. And Sol has grown again.
They look down at the churning sea from whence they came. And Sol gathers himself along Kal’s back, clinging to him tight as he shoots up into the sky like a rocket. To the clouds. To freedom.
They land at the base of a mountain somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. On a rock surrounded by snowpack with not a soul around but a chipmunk who skitters away into the brush as soon as they arrive. Kal draws his knees to his chest and heaves a shuddering breath.
I am sorry, says Sol, and he wraps around Kal’s shoulders like a hug.
Kal furrows his brow at that, because it doesn’t make sense. “But you saved me.”
You should have never had to have been saved. I failed you, Kal-El. I could not stop the infiltration. I could not stop them from changing me.
Suddenly a rage bubbles up from Kal’s chest to his throat, and his fists clench tight. Sol shouldn’t feel this way. Sol should never have to feel this way. Light sparks at his fingertips. He wants to destroy everything in his path, because it isn’t fair. But instead, he sits himself down, into the snow. He lays against it and feels its cool firmness on his back, bringing down his body temperature. He clenches his teeth and exhales through them.
“I couldn’t stop them from getting into my head, either,” says Kal. His voice is very small, and so is he.
There are a few moments of silence while Sol seems to deliberate on a response. There is none. He drifts away from Kal and towards the treetops, beckoning him forward. Kal follows, as Sol winds himself between two trunks and forms a hammock from the dust.
“Sol,” Kal asks, running his fingers through the fabric. It's springy and textured, but soft in his hands. “Are you alright?”
Sol does not respond for a minute, and Kal begins to wonder if this is how Sol felt every time Kal had given him the silent treatment. Worried. Helpless. Useless. He bunches the fabric up in his hands and tries to give it a comforting squeeze.
Finally, Sol speaks up. No, he admits. No, I am not. I am frightened. Frightened of what is to come.
Kal sits on the hammock and swings his legs over, settling into him. He wraps the hammock around himself like a cocoon, a grounding pressure around him, under him.
“It’s okay,” he says. He pets the hammock gently and nuzzles his face into the fabric. “I’m afraid, too.”
Sol almost seems to breathe against him, a comforting warmth rumbling through the dust. He squeezes the hammock tighter and bundles Kal to himself. Then we will shoulder this fear together. I am glad to have you with me.