DISCLAIMER: Oh, I wish Smallville belonged to me. There'd be a lot more nekkid!Clark.
TITLE: Inside
SUMMARY: A life defined by Time.
Note: I'm hoping that this will be the first of a series of one-shots about Lana. But we'll see. Here's to a first foray into the Smallville-verse.
Once, a long time ago, she was a little girl in a fairy princess costume who screamed and screamed until she was all screamed out, hoarse and tear-stained and asleep in her crying aunt's arms. When she sees that picture—which she inevitably does, at least once a week, when someone else does a write-up of the former Mrs. Luthor—she studies it. Each time, she finds something new. Her mouth, she discovered, was perfect in its misery. A simple, flawless oval. When she smiles, now, or just looks, there is always the slight crinkle to the right side or the too-thin spread over her front teeth. But in that moment, the fairy princess who fell so fast from the castle walls, her mouth was perfect.
Occasionally, in the dark, she dreams of the days before the fairy princess. Her father, she remembers, used to have a beard, a somewhat lopsided goatee and stubble, of which he was very proud. It didn't suit him, and the day her mother forced him to shave it off was a relief. But he had been so sad that day. And he would nag at her mother, teasingly, with that wry, awkward tilt to his head, suggesting that she should shave her head.
Ever eager to please her father, she'd offered her own head, offered to go through the pain with him. He'd laughed--his soft laugh that always seemed to boom over all other sounds because it was so light--lifted her up, tossed her lightly and said, with perfect seriousness, "No princess ever shaved her head. Do you think Rapunzel did? Or Cinderella? You're a princess, Lana. No princess ever shaved her head."
The screaming fairy princess on the cover of that magazine has bangs--choppy, somewhat uneven bangs. Some days, she wishes she could Photoshop them to even perfection. They are just slightly too long over her right eye. It makes her eyes seem flawed, which she likes. Time did a follow up when she was a sophomore—mourning Whitney, dreaming of Clark, amazed by the Elizabethan romanticism of Byron. Her picture, juxtaposed with the fairy princess's photo, is flawless. There is that certain chubbiness to her face, that good old fashioned baby fat, that makes her look so innocent. But the set of her jaw, the look in her eyes—those show the girl underneath. The diamond cradled in velvet.
She glittered on her wedding day and looked ideally lost in the papparazzi photos from the "miscarriage." Coverage of her "death" elevated her pedestal until she was even with the sun. So bright you couldn't look at her straight on, so you used all sorts of fancy tools and tricks to get an approximation of her persona.
Some days, when she gets out of the shower, before she gets dressed, she runs her hand from her diaphragm to her hip bone, pushes at the gentle swell between her navel and groin and mourns the images in her head: stretch marks and a huge belly and endless exercise regimes and breast feeding and burping, cradling, singing, kissing and tickling. Loving. It amazes her, still, that it was all just images in her head. Not even in her head—all just images in one sick man's head, implanted into her own by money and deception.
She thought she would be a mother. She dreamed of her family—her family—of her sons and daughters and their children and how she would record it, trace it, explain to her children when they were very small how important it was to know your past (so when it came and possessed you, you knew where to start), to know where you came from so you could figure out where you were going. She'd learned the Luthor lineage, retraced Henry Small's family tree and treated her mother's family kindly, if unlovingly. She loved her mother but had learned, the hard way, over many years, that the Potter women's innate ability to swim through every storm mostly involved crafting rafts from self-made corpses.
Time wanted another interview with her when she returned from Shanghai, then again when she started Isis. They gave her a three page write-up when she was in that "coma." And they want another one, now that Isis is up and running again in its new incarnation. The reporter on the phone asked about the name, claimed to have done some research and come up with too many conflicting identities for the goddess.
She smiled when she heard that, and suggested starting with the Egyptian name, not the Greek one. The reporter questioned her further, so she hung up. One thing she'd learned from Lex and Lionel was never to waste time with imbeciles. The world always beckons more.
She would have had more patience for the man had he addressed her properly, but he'd stumbled—intimidated, maybe?—and started with "Mrs. Luthor." It was a done deal after that. She is a Potter woman and she is proud of it. She is a Small and she is proud of it. She is Lewis Lang's daughter and she will never stop loving him. She is even a Thoreaux, and she respects that identity, possibly fears it. But she is not and has never been a Luthor.
For the first time in 23 years, she knows who she is and she is ready to show that identity to the world. No long hair to hide behind—it's all gone, pixie-cut (ever the fairy, you coward)—no fancy name or brand-name clothes. She's got on some nameless fuzzy slippers, jeans from a thrift store and an old Smallville High t-shirt. Her name is Lana Lang. She lives on East 26th Street, in a bright one-bedroom that the remainder of the divorce settlement paid for. She runs the Isis Foundation, which aims to unite adults who want children with kids who want parents. The Foundation also provides an after-school sanctuary for foster children. On the side, the Foundation assists the meteor-challenged.
Lana Lang is also a mother, the first client of Isis. In the next room, taking her afternoon nap, is a beautiful, chubby baby girl, 9 months old, named Isabelle. Isabelle loves sunshine, applesauce and mud. She prefers instrumental classical music but will make exceptions for particularly beautiful arias and the Beatles. Isabelle is the sole survivor of a car crash that killed her mother, aunt and older brother. She has one scar that splits her right eyebrow in half and another on her right shoulder, curving from front to back. It is thin and pink now, not bright burning red like it used to be, and will fade soon enough. She is petrified of thunder but likes looking at the lightning.
Isabelle's last name is Lang. Lana has carefully kept all of the information about Isabelle's biological family in the safe at the Isis Foundation's SoHo house. When her baby girl is old enough, she'll know everything, and she can choose to take her old last name. But for now, her name is Isabelle Lang, she is Lana Lang's only child (so far?) and she is free of the Potter curse with all the advantages of being a Small/Lang/Potter/Thoreaux—and yes, a Luthor.
Lana Lang is a working single mother who flew far away from the castle. She has finally stopped screaming.