the shadow child CHAPTER FIVE

Here, time passes differently than it does for my family. Not faster, nor is it slower. It's like stillness in motion, where we hang suspended in empty air while lives begin and end beneath us, around us, between us. We don't measure time in seconds, minutes, days, or years.

We measure it in memories.

But I don't have any. Not from my life. The span of my existence only lasted as long as my journey, which was almost instantaneous. I was a flash, a fleeting presence.

I learned to flash again.

Not in the same way, of course. I can't literally go back, curl up inside my mother and pretend until she wakes that I will one day have the life she'd dreamed for me - or rather, let her pretend. I have no such desire. I don’t know what it means. But I learned what it is that I am - because of how I was lost, I can be found. That's how I flash. In my parents' eyes I can be seen in those hazy spaces between dreaming and waking - I'm there just as they open their eyes, an instant before the light comes in and they blink against it.

Then I'm lost again.

But I know they can feel me.

I shouldn't do it as often as I do, because it leaves them subdued throughout the morning. They exchange heavy looks through eyes that are now empty of me, my mother smiles wanly and tries to hide the tear - but my father never misses her tears, even when he doesn't see them. It's always that way. But still I go back.

I suppose you could say I was selfish, if I knew what selfishness felt like. I know what it looks like though. I've seen it, born of loneliness, contempt, denial, greed, and pain. I saw it in two people the summer after I died.

The first was my brother. Clark could never really be purely selfish, but he was selfish for a pure reason.

Hunger.

He craved peace, he longed to forget, he was starving for numbness, and nothing could give him that. He took whatever the unbound beast inside him wanted, with almost no regard for who might be hurt by it or how, all in the hope that he might truly become what he believed he was. A monster. Falling prey to the worst of himself was so much easier than facing the pain he'd tried to leave behind, and he believed it was the only way. He could only keep his head above water by first drowning his reality. He was driven by his consuming need to no longer be who he was.

Clark's selfishness, I knew, was a façade. It was part of the shell he'd molded around himself under the influence of the red stone in his ring, the barrier that protected him from feeling too much and forgetting too little. It was a powerful illusion, but one thing Clark didn't understand - I still don't think he does - is that the power of his purpose far outweighs the hold of any stone. That's why there were lines he wouldn't cross. That's why he couldn't get swept away with the trail of beautiful girls attracted by his outwardly confident swagger and deceptively devious grin. That's why he didn't do what he could have done when Lana came to him. That's why he'd buy a car and give it away. There was no satisfaction in any of it. Nothing left him sated, because there was nothing that he truly wanted. Not there.

The only things he wanted - the things he needed - were the things he was certain he'd destroyed. But if ash turns to ash, and dust to dust, what does something made of love return to?

Something forged of bitterness, however, is ash and dust to begin with. The brand of selfishness I saw in Julian might have toppled me, had I experienced enough life to feel the fire of it. He too was driven by hunger, but his was tainted, colored by contempt and madness. He plunged his own brother into madness with him.

That summer on the island was the first time Julian reached out to Lex, but he never quite broke through. He says it was because Lex lied, that he never really loved him at all. That he only pretended to. I know that isn't true - I even knew it then, although I'd only just arrived, because Lex's bond with Julian was one of the only pure things about him. Those who leave the way I did can sense purity.

Julian said those things when he was wounded. I wanted to ask him what pain was like, as I didn't know. I imagine it to be like dough under a rolling pin. That's one of the things I watch my mother do with fascination - rolling dough. The pin goes back and forth, over and over, relentless, wearing the dough thin in places, piling it thickly in others, pressing it and pulling, sometimes tearing it. Sometimes bits of it stick to the pin and they're never put back the same way. It looks like pain to me.

Whether Julian's pain induced his selfishness, or his selfishness wrought his pain, I still have not learned, but he was changed after that summer, like the dough that's been rolled too thin. He reached out to Lex on the island… and Lex reached back. They spoke every day, Lex believed he saw him - they were friends. Julian was genuinely happy, what I imagine to be for the first time. But something clouded Julian's perfect reunion.

His brother did not recognize him. Lex called him Lewis.

Julian tried to pretend that it didn't matter to him, that he could be content with the illusion as long as his brother was there - the only person who hadn't betrayed him in life. Now in death, Lex was the only one Julian wanted. He was a little brother again, the companion he was meant to be. It was the role he'd been robbed of. He couldn't see the way that Lex saw him though, and he couldn't understand why his brother wanted to leave.

Why he wanted to leave him.

Again.

I've learned that Luthors cannot abide solitude - none of them, for any length of time. They fill the emptiness in their lives with people who don't really belong there, but they take up the necessary spaces for the time being. Julian refused to acknowledge that Lex did not belong there - that he still had life to live. He tried to convince his brother to stay - he told him how he hated his father, how he'd been forced out of his family by little more than a slight of hand. He thought Lex would sympathize, but it terrified him - because he saw the same hatred in himself. Julian pleaded and reasoned and begged, tried everything he could think of to make his brother stay.

Until his brother turned on him.

Lex called him crazy, he slashed at him with words and a blade, screamed at him hatefully until Julian had been bled dry of hope and humanity. Lex never knew what he'd done, but in his descent into madness, he'd severed the ties that bound him to the only real family he had. The only part of it that had always loved him.

Lex still believed then that he was the one who had killed his brother.

He'll never realize it, but on the island that summer, that's exactly what he did.