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What does it take to make Superman stagger down the street like a drunkard? No, not a drunkard, Lex thought. More like a man whose entire world had been torn asunder. He stood his ground, arms crossed, as Superman swayed towards him. If Superman was going to launch another attack, then Lex wasn't going to be cowed. He'd go with his head up, showing no fear, never showing himself to be intimidated by the all-powerful alien.
It wasn't with violence, though, that Superman approached. Tears streamed down his face, his skin was red and blotchy, his shoulders bowed down like he carried the weight of the world – something he could, quite literally, do – and his whole body shuddered with the force of his sobs.
He walked up to Lex, as Lex stood by the secret back entrance of Luthor Towers, and held out his hands to Lex like a supplicant. His eyes were begging, leaving Lex puzzled as to why Superman hadn't launched yet another of his attacks. Lex had become used to the constant abuse heaped on his character and on his person by Superman, but this time the expected attack was not forthcoming.
Lex said nothing, but allowed his posture to relax, become less threatening, turning his body very slightly sideways instead of standing full on and confrontational, as he would usually. He wasn't seeking another fight with Superman now.
"Superman…" he said, and trailed off. He didn't know whether to go on the attack and start to defend himself against whatever accusations Superman would hurl or to ask what was wrong. 'What's up? What's wrong? What's the matter?' these were things that Lex Luthor didn't ask of anyone, never mind his self-appointed nemesis.
"My mother," Superman sobbed, both hands held out to Lex. "They killed her. Someone shot her…"
Superman collapsed to his knees at Lex's feet, just where Lex had wanted him for years, his great shoulders heaving as he broke down.
Lex stood and watched as Superman shattered at his feet, thinking of all the damage and pain this man had brought to him. His back still twinged early on cold mornings from a time that Superman had slammed him against a wall. His bank account cried under the weight of super-hero damage insurance for all the destruction Superman had caused to his property. Lawyers had grown fat on his court cases and publicists had grown rich on his personal defence against every slander levied against him by this alien menace. He ran a hand over his head and reminded himself once more that it was Superman's fault he was bald, Superman's fault he'd grown up as a freak, ostracised as a child when he should have been loved. It was Superman's fault his Presidency had been blighted and his ambitions thwarted.
But as Superman sobbed, his giant heart breaking, Lex felt his knees start to give way almost of their own volition. He tried to play a mental recording of every lie he'd heard from Superman, ever insult and attack, but his heart followed its own path, as always. His father had warned him he was too emotional, and as he knelt and put his arms around Superman's broad shoulders he had to agree with his long dead sire. Once again Superman had managed to bring Lex to his knees.
He patted Superman's back, awkwardly at first, with manly awareness, then with more sincerity as Superman buried his face in Lex's shoulder. His shirt rapidly dampened, tears and mucus, and he was sure he'd have bruises where Superman's fingers dug into his back in a desperate grasp for comfort.
"Who? Who killed her?" Lex had to ask if Superman knew.
Superman shook his head, crying too hard to speak, just gasping out a few sounds Lex took to mean: "I don't know. I just… I found her in her kitchen… she was shot."
"I'm sorry," Lex murmured, threading his fingers into Superman's hair. "She was a beautiful woman, very kind and gracious. I'm sorry for your loss."
They knelt there, in the alley where Lex snuck into his building to avoid the press, while Superman sobbed. He broke like he had never done for his father, not for anyone else who'd touched his life and left, a victim of human mortality. Lex understood another reason for the grief – Superman himself would remain untouched by that same mortality, doomed to outlive everyone he loved, and Martha Kent had been the last person who'd truly loved him, no matter what mistakes her son made. Now Superman would have no one, he would be truly alone. Superman wasn't only grieving for the loss of his beloved mother, but for the loss of everyone in his life who understood and believed in him. Believed in him as Clark Kent, not as a legendary saviour and hero. People loved Superman because he was a magical deux ex machina to all of their problems. They loved him for his uniform in the same way some people would love a fireman regardless of whether the fireman was an asshole or just plain ugly when he wasn't wearing the suit. It was a fetish for the uniform and what it represented - not a love for the person inside in all his foibles and flaws.
Superman was as alone as Lex himself, he thought, and he understood the pain of such loneliness. Through his own mistakes, through his father's influence, and through the loss and influence of Clark Kent, Lex also was alone. Of course, over the years that had become by choice. He trusted no one and wanted no one close to him who would betray him the way Clark had. No more would he allow himself to love and deceive himself that he was loved in return, only to have the pain of finding out the truth.
"Why?" Lex had to ask.
"I don't know," Superman stuttered through his sobs.
"I don't mean why she was… I mean, why have you come to me? We're enemies, Superman, as you may recall."
Superman just held on harder, "It doesn't matter, does it. All of it. Any of it. It doesn't matter how hard I try to bring you to justice, you always get away with it. I don't care right now."
Lex sat quietly, listening to Superman's sobs get quieter and puzzled over it. Superman had spent the last ten years chasing him, trying to catch him out doing something wrong. Lex had been in and out of court a dozen times, always escaping, albeit with reputation slightly tarnished, because of Superman's vendetta.
"I must admit, I find it both an insult and an annoyance that you dismiss your constant harassment of me as unimportant in the face of your own personal tragedy."
"I'm sorry," Superman said, "I had to… you had to be the bad guy, Lex. But I don't care anymore, I'm sick of them."
"What do you mean by I 'had to be the bad guy'?"
"If you were evil, if you were wrong, then I was right to destroy our friendship, Lex. If you weren't evil, if you were like everyone else said, just some rich philanthropist, then that meant I threw away our friendship over nothing."
"I'm sure that I gave you plenty of reason to end our friendship, Clark," Lex said, feeling the anger coil up inside of him, but keeping his words open and leading.
Superman shook his head, "You were doing bad things because I made you do them. I lied to you so much that you were just doing crazy stuff because you thought aliens were a threat. If I'd been honest with you, you'd never have done what you did."
It was re-writing history, Lex supposed, in order to pile more guilt on Superman's shoulders. But when they had been friends, years ago, Clark had wallowed in guilt. He'd heap guilt upon himself as high as it could go and moan and complain and cry to Lex about how everything was his fault. Lex had long known that Clark had taken a great pleasure in his own emotional pain – no one allowed themselves to suffer like that if they didn't enjoy it on some masochistic level. Back then, Lex had pointed out all the ways in which nothing was really Clark's fault, but now he let Superman keep all that guilt, misplaced as it was.
"Perhaps, but that was in the past, Clark. If you now recognise that I am not the re-incarnation of Satan on this earth, perhaps we can come to some sort of détente?" Lex knew he'd never had the decency to show the public the depths to which he could sink, although he'd let Superman see it. He'd let the public see how he could help them, give them jobs and money and luxury and save their city, but they'd never seen him kill his own father, and they'd never heard the victims of his scientific experiments beg for an end to their pain.
"I destroyed your marriage, Lex," Superman said.
"I know," Lex said, glad Superman's face was turned so he wouldn't see the twitching in Lex's eye.
"I read about it in the paper. She said in her divorce petition that she couldn't stand having an alien super being as her husband's stalker."
"You destroyed our home, Clark. You pushed down the walls and burned her wardrobe in an effort to find out if I was hiding something evil in my underwear drawer. You can't blame her for giving up. You can be quite frightening, and she is merely human. I paid her off well, though; you don't need to worry about her."
"I'm not. I don't care about her. I don't care about any of them. I'm just sorry I hurt you again."
"You care, Clark. You've always cared too much about us frail and fragile human beings."
"No, I know I should, but I don't. Not enough." Superman lifted his head and looked over Lex's shoulders, his eyes vacant. "I keep saving them and trying to help them and trying to get the bad guys off the street and they keep coming back. There's always someone else in danger, someone doing something stupid, someone else being violent. I think that all of them, all of you humans, you're all murderers and thieves at heart. Only the fear of someone like me punishing you stops you all from killing each other. It's always up to me to try and stop it."
"Everyone has the potential for good or bad in them, Clark. I've seen you do terrible things, despite your image as a paragon of virtue. And even the worst amongst us can occasionally do something wonderful."
"That's the difference between us, Lex. I've been thinking about it," Superman wiped his tears on the back of his sleeve before continuing. "I do good things, I try to do everything right because I don't really like people. I think people need to be saved from themselves. I don't trust people to do the right thing."
Superman took a deep breath before continuing, "You, though, you love people, don't you?" He looked at Lex like it was such a strange and peculiar idea. "You love other people and you want them to love you. You do everything you can to help people and help them become the best that they can. You just keep doing it the wrong way."
"Sometimes. Sometimes I get it right, Clark," Lex smiled, but knew his eyes were narrow with anger. "After all, I am the man who found the cure for most common forms of cancer, found an easy way to allow Americans to turn their body fat into bio fuel, and brokered peace in the Middle East."
"Yeah, by using human subjects illegally and issuing military threats. But that's my point," Superman continued before Lex could interrupt. "You do all the wrong things but you do it because you love people despite everything that's happened to you and you make mistakes because you don't know enough about being human. I do the right things, but I do it because I know all too much about being human."
"How ironic, coming from an alien."
Superman sniffed loudly, "Yeah, I know."
Lex handed him his handkerchief; mauve with LL embroidered in the corner.
"So, with your new found understanding and dislike of human beings, will you give up being Superman?"
Superman shrugged, then shook his head. "No, I can't abandon people. I just can't. I can't leave anyone who needs help. I can't abandon anyone the way my parents abandoned me."
"Your parents didn't abandon you, Clark," Lex felt the need to defend dead parents, he would never accept that his mother had been anything other than unwillingly torn away from him. "They died. There's no way your mother would have left you by choice."
"Not the Kents. My real parents. They abandoned me to this planet because my father loved his honour more than he loved me, and my mother loved him more than she loved her own son. They had a chance to be with me and escape but they loved their pride more than they loved me. They threw me into space alone because they would rather die than bow their heads and go back on a promise. What kind of monsters do that to a child?"
Lex didn't have an answer for that. There was nothing he wouldn't do to have his own daughter back, and he'd destroy this planet if it would put her back in his arms. But he had to correct Clark on one point.
"Those were your birth parents, Clark. Not your real parents. The Kents were your real parents and they loved you."
"And now they're dead. They were the last people on this planet that truly loved me."
"Lois-"
"Lois loves Superman. I mean me, the real me, Clark Kent. You were the last, you know?" Superman looked deep into Lex's eyes for the first time since he'd arrived. Lex hated those blue eyes. Clark's eyes had lost the beautiful corn-leaf green Lex had loved from the first time Superman had put on his disguise. "You were the last person who truly loved me. For me. Not just because I saved your life, but because you really liked me."
Lex had no answer for that. It was true, but not something he wanted to confess to.
Superman searched his face, looking for a response. "You loved me then, I know you did. I know you don't now, how could you after everything I've done to you?"
"You've been attacking me, privately and professionally for a long time, Clark. All of the articles you've written in The Daily Planet, how many of them were fuelled by your own personal vendetta?" He held up a hand, forestalling Superman's reply before he could talk of evidence and research. "Perhaps this is neither the time nor the place for this discussion. I always make sure the alley is reasonably clean, but it's still not somewhere I care to spend a lot of time. Besides, I believe we are disturbing the rats. Come upstairs, clean your face. Have you phoned the police?"
Superman shook his head again, and allowed Lex to usher him up to the penthouse. He leaned on Lex's shoulder as if surrounded by Kryptonite and too weak to carry his own weight. Lex led him inside and let him fall down on his bed. Superman drew himself up into as tight a ball as his sheer size would allow, hugging his knees to his chest.
Lex left him to get orange juice from the kitchen. He nearly stopped to bring aspirin, as his mother had done for him when he'd cried as a child, but that was a futile gesture for Superman. He handed Superman the glass and sat on the bed next to him, stroking his hair while Superman sat up to drink it. For all of the anger and resentment between them, it was hard to hate Superman now, now that he was brought so low by his grief. They stayed on the bed with Lex's feet on the floor, stroking his fingers through Superman's thick dark hair until the sobs had quieted to nothing but the occasional hiccup, his eyes red, but not swollen. Even his own tears could barely hurt him. Lex supposed the redness would fade unnaturally fast, too.
There was a quiet knock on the door, and when Lex called to enter his butler stuck his head around to let them know they should turn on the television, before he discreetly left. The butler didn't react to the presence of Superman at all.
Lex grabbed the remote, lowering the television from the ceiling, and turned it on. He didn't have to guess which channel as every channel showed the urgent news update of Superman in Lex Luthor's arms. Someone had rushed the film to one of the stations, and it was being picked up by every news service. A huge story: Superman's confession that he loved Lex Luthor, that he hated people.
Lex worked hard to show no emotion at Superman's proclamation that Lex was the good person who loved people, and that all of the attacks launched against Lex were nothing more than a personal vendetta. The authorities would probably try to sue Superman for wasting their time and money on needless prosecutions, Lex thought, although Clark didn't have two dimes to rub together. Nonetheless, they would probably try it, in order to force him to release Kryptonian technology or work for the government to repay his debt. It would take all of Lex's legal resources to protect Superman from his unwise words. Perhaps Clark would even be a little grateful for the effort.
The most interesting bit of news, of course, was Superman's identity. Lex watched himself on the screen, looking calm and in control, and utterly forgiving, as he held Superman in his arms and called him Clark. Clark was captured even naming his parents.
The newsreader was pink cheeked with excitement as he talked about Clark's secret identity. Old photographs were dug up of Clark in his glasses from some news event – possibly even a LexCorp press conference. The photograph showed him standing next to Lois Lane, previously famously linked to Superman as his paramour, now shown to be a foolish woman and biased reporter with an inappropriate crush and no feelings at all for the real person. It would ruin her career and destroy her personal reputation. Lex turned his face to the wall until he was sure he had his smile defeated.
He turned back to look at Clark's face, taking in the pale shock and frozen expression. He rubbed a hand across Clark's shoulders, trying to comfort him.
"I didn't know we were being filmed," Clark said, and his voice was high and shocked.
"It doesn't matter, Clark," Lex said. "With your mother dead, who is left for you to protect? You don't need to lie anymore. Not to me, not to anyone."
"But, I… my life…" Superman looked at the wall, and the direction of his gaze and the squint in his eye told Lex that he was looking towards his own tiny apartment, looking through buildings and wall after wall after wall. "They're in my home, Lex. There are people in my home."
"Reporters, perhaps?" Lex asked. "Or just the public, come to strip it of anything they can souvenir."
"I have to-"
"No, don't. Let them take what they want," Lex tightened his grip as if he had any hope of stopping Superman should he desire to leave. "I can replace anything of value. Anything personal is already gone and you'd have to hurt people to get it back. All of your memories are back at the farm. I'll get my security force to protect it all."
Lex clicked off a quick text message with the address of the Kent farm and sent his teams out there. They'd protect the place, shoot to kill anyone who stepped foot on the soon-to-be-famous Kent farm. They'd also deal with the body of Clark's mother, in a fully legal and tidy way.
Superman nodded and lay down again, defeated. "You're right. It doesn't matter anymore," he whispered, and closed his eyes.
"I'll keep them all away, until you're ready to go back," Lex said, knowing that already the press would be surrounding his building, too, looking for interviews with himself and his guest. There would be a throng of people outside – the usual groupie fans, and those who thought they had the right to offer condolences in person, and those who would attack the alien for being frightening, for admitting he didn't like people all that much. Superman had always been loved because he'd been seen as loving, but his admission that he saw people for what they really were, and really didn't care for them would make his perfectly normal point of view into something terrifying. Simply because of his strength and abilities.
"I just… I need to sleep," Clark said, and barely moved when Lex stood up to remove Clark's boots and cape.
The sun was glinting low over the horizon and it hurt Lex's eyes as the beams poured in, colouring Clark in red and gold where he lay on Lex's bed, the blotches fading from his cheeks as he struggled to hold on to his grief in the face of his emotional exhaustion.
Lex stood by the bed and watched him fall asleep, and wondered if he would dare lie down beside Clark and listen to him breathe throughout the night and would Clark still be there in the morning. There was a certain wonder in having Clark here again, a certain unreality, as if it wasn't really true or it wasn't really Clark. Lex felt like he should hold his breath, afraid to exhale in case Clark smelled the truth on him. He lay down, his head on the same pillow, and smiled a little when Clark's hand twitched over to rest on his hip, seeking comfort.
Perhaps he had signed his death warrant when he ordered the hit, and he knew that at the time. Born of anger and endless frustration and Superman's never ending quest to destroy him, Lex had finally sought the only revenge he could by ordering the death of one of the only people who had ever been kind to him. He did it with genuine regret as he had truly cared for Martha, or at least yearned for what she represented. He certainly hadn't expected such a positive outcome. He'd either expected to die at Superman's hand if Superman had suspected him at worst, or to see his enemy as hurt as Lex had often been at best. This was unforeseen, but Lex had never hesitated to make the best of any situation. And having Clark here, in his bed, dependent on Lex for friendship and love, was most definitely the best outcome possible.
He'd have to give Mercy a bonus – not only for the neat, clean way she had killed Superman's mother, but for her foresight to take the LexCorp building security footage to the press so quickly, while Superman's grief was too fresh to make him cautious. Or perhaps Lex would kill her himself, make sure that she could never reveal what she knew. It would probably be safer that way, although he'd miss her efficiency and loyalty.
Lex stroked his fingers through Clark's hair again, and vowed that he would fulfil every favour Clark asked, for Clark and his friends, just as he'd done when they were young and innocent and still friends. He'd keep Clark happy and content and by his side, sacrifice anything for their friendship, just as he'd always done, and if his actions and deceptions were discovered, then he'd accept the almost inevitable broken neck with a smile. The power of having Superman as his ally and the pleasure of having Clark as his friend would make it worth every moment.
I couldn't find anyone to beta read this, so if you see any mistakes PLEASE let me know!
I nearly called this Lex Luthor's Greatest Hits, but that was a bit of a give away of the ending.
Notes: If you liked it, leave a comment! That's why I post my stuff, to get feedback. Feed me! Follow me on .com Read more of my stories on my own website at . /~brussell or archiveofourown/users/iibnf