#lillian.

cat: sorry i disappeared last night, sugar!!!

cat: i left to keep partying somewhere else😇

-- THE REDHEAD stands in front of a fireplace in a black void. The liminial space between sleeping and waking, between worlds. She’d been dead, but then she’d found herself alive, trapped in this strange limbo. She’d reached out to her son. But it wasn’t him, not quite. Even more ruthless than her dear Alexander had become. He would go on to destroy entire Earths for his own amusement. Billions, not simply thousands dead. Entire worlds laid to ash.

But there was still time, the stranger who’d brought her back had told her. A mission granted in return for this half-life.

A meeting of the mothers was in order. We need to talk about Alexander. To that end, she’s yanked her alternate self across the worlds, a shadowed dreamscape.

A woman with fire-red hair and blood red lips, covered in dirt. Torn apart by cancer and stitched back together by radiation. It had prolonged her life once, and now it was forever keeping her alive.

There was dirt under her fingernails, a muddy white dress more fitting an angel than a dead mother. Dirt-stained fingers curled around the handle to the mansion, flashes of terror and fear and pain arching down her spine. 

She could start a new life. She could run away. Lillian Luthor was dead.

But in her sleep, she’d met things far beyond Earth. They had sang to her to calm her down as she watched, powerless, as her son kept walking down the path she’d already tried to warn him against. And so, she had ripped herself from death and into that green glowing light.

Time to lecture her son in person. She took a breath, shoving the door open. Tried not to recoil, to wrap her arms around him. She loved him, missed him. But he’d ignored her when she’d tried so hard to warn him. 

Not even a hello, just strolled up to his desk without a sound. Straight to business, the Luthor instead of the Arlene side of the family. Her son had decided to become a Luthor, no matter how many times the mother had tried to intervene.

Her eldest son! Oh how he's grown-- not at all on the path she'd envisioned for him. Warned him of.

Alexander looks up at the intrustion and goes incredibly silent with this bewilderment & fury on his face.

The man he's talking to is confused as well. Less afraid than Alex-- he doesn't know who she is. The man's worried shaking of Alex and frantic glances between departed mother and her beloved, broken monster in training gain him no answers.

Her boy's red-rimmed eyes simply track her around the room. There are things here she doesn't recognize, her son's taste in art far more modern and colorful than the antique ghosts Lionel surrounded himself with.

"This house is still as dead as it was before, isn't it?" She traces her fingers over the sword on the wall. Of course Lionel taught Alexander to appreciate violence.

Her son tries to respond but it's all stuck in his throat, too many questions to ask at once. That mind. He was still so smart and curious, one part of himself that had escaped Lionel's fatherly wisdom intact.

She walks to the couch to comfort him but he shrinks back and nearly stumbles. "Alexander, be reasonable."

"What are you?" He hisses through venomous fangs. "You're one of those shapeshifters. Or a clone. I-- Clark, you see her too right?" His composure is cracking. Poor boy.

Lilian turns her head to smile at Clark, appraising him. He doesn't shrink away. In fact, he moves slightly in front of Alexander. Oh, good. He has someone protecting him in this struggle between shadows.