Lex finds out something about Clark's vulnerability, and what it has to do with Lana. I leave it to your imagination as to the last time she wore it. No sex, no slash, lots of innuendo.
Timeline: very early in the first season, soon after Lex found Lana's little-green-rock necklace in the cornfield, and handed it over to Clark to give back to her so he could win her over from the mean old quarterback who strung him up, but Clark left it hanging on her front door, since he couldn't exactly hand it to her in person. Strategist Lex doesn't like having his plans thwarted.
Disclaimer: Don't own nothing except my toothbrush, class ring, and opinions.
Weakness
The cue ball clicked and deflected nicely off its intended mark, which rolled into a pocket and left the cue ball set up for another easy shot. Lex shook his head in frustrated admiration. "How do you do it? Took me years and three instructors to learn that."
The taller boy smiled shyly. "I have my own good instructor in you, Lex."
"And a computer for a brain, no doubt. You probably aced geometry in your sleep."
"Well ... yeah, I guess. Math comes easy for me." Clark ducked his head and concentrated on the set-up. For one second, Lex thought he saw the innocently smiling eyes change, become something sad and old and tired, hopeless and far away. Clark shifted position and went for an impossible double-rebound, missing the easy shot that a five-year-old could have made. He sighed and stepped back with a shrug. "Guess I screwed that one up."
Lex narrowed his own eyes. Anyone who couldn't tell that he had missed deliberately was too stupid to be allowed an opinion. Why, Clark? he wanted to demand. Why do you handicap yourself like this? He pursed his lips and gave his own shot only halfhearted attention. He sunk the red ball, but was left with no possible next shots, so just took out his frustrations with his friend's evasiveness and incomprehensibility on a wild hard abuse of the cue ball. "Trust me, I would have known if Lana Lang had come into the mansion. Or does just the thought of her do that to you?"
"Wha- what?" Lex definitely saw the innocently friendly face go pale. Clark couldn't play poker if his life depended on it. "What are you talking about?"
Lex snorted. "My plant manager Gabe Sullivan's daughter is a friend of yours, I believe. She regales him with dinnertime tales of the Lana and Clark show, which for some reason he feels compelled to repeat whenever things are going smoothly. Mixed blessings, that. Sometimes I'd rather he had a crisis to attend to. According to him, as according to her, you lose all semblance of your usual grace when in the presence of the cheerleader."
Clark bit his lip, but rather than blush as Lex had expected, he was still pale. "I'm really just naturally clumsy. All knees and elbows, you know? I got my growth early."
"Which certainly explains why you beat me three times out of five at a game of coordination and skill which I had to teach you from scratch." Lex hadn't grown up a Luthor without being able to tell when someone was lying, much less so inexpert a liar as Clark. "My bet is that the cheerleader you're still admiring from afar and her quarterback still occupy a certain amount of attention that should be on other things. Like walking and remembering where you're supposed to be going at the same time."
"Well ... yes. I can't deny that."
"Clark. Either get over it or make your move. I know it's difficult for high schoolers to believe, but no girl is worth tripping over your own feet or carrying a hopeless torch for. If you think it's hopeless, then quit torturing yourself and move on."
Clark turned back to the billiard table, and gave himself away with a tightening of his lips and a harder-than-necessary whack of the cue ball. Harder than Lex had done, in fact. To Lex's astonishment, two of his target balls went slamming into their pockets.
Clark took a deep breath and visibly worked hard to get himself back under control. Lex revised his estimate of Clark's ability to keep a poker face. He was upset enough about something to let the mask he'd been wearing slip, and therefore reveal that the calm and the excuses had been a mask. There was something else involved on the Lana front.
"This wouldn't have something to do with her necklace, would it?" he prodded gently, at a guess. "Did you give it back to her and not get the reaction you should have?"
Clark spun on him with an expression of emotion so mixed and intense that Lex was actually at a loss to read it. Then he slumped. "Yes. I gave it back to her. And yes. She thought it was from Whitney. I didn't -- stick around."
What the HELL...? "You didn't give it to her with your own hands and tell her everything? Clark, I've been known to do some clueless things in my time, but leaving the keys in the Ferrari on the streets of downtown Metropolis overnight is not one of them. How could you just throw away that whole situation? You had the quarterback dead to rights."
Clark turned away and closed his eyes, leaving his face in profile. "I -- I couldn't."
Damn, but the kid was beautiful. Lex wanted to have him sculpted in bronze. With gold and gemstone highlights. How could anyone be so utterly unaware the effect he had on other people? Must be from living in a barn with only chickens and cows for company.
"You couldn't what? Take advantage of the fact that the girl you want might get angry at her jock of a boyfriend for treating her precious necklace like a worthless bauble, as well as nearly crucifying you? Clark, if you can't do something that plain and simple, you certainly shouldn't be hanging out with a Luthor."
Clark just bowed his head. There was no way to ever explain to Lex. Or to Lana. Or even to his parents, really, though at least they could understand why it was impossible for him to hand Lana her necklace in person. He still had the lead box, after all. But it would have been ... awkward.
Lex just shook his head. Clark's seemingly-ingrained convictions of what he should and shouldn't do were only one more of those things that made him want to take the all too unworldly farmboy under his wing and teach him how to survive in the brutal real world.
Yet every time he thought Clark couldn't surprise him any further with his naivety, Clark proved to actually know what was going on. And every time Clark seemed to have a clue, the kid went into what Gabe Sullivan had referred to with a snicker as "Lana-mode."
It was as if just being around Lana, or even anything associated with her, like that cheap meteorite necklace, made him panicky and weak and unable to think straight.
Lex settled for reaching over and gently removing the cue stick from Clark's unresisting hand, though it was positive effort not to stroke the boy's perfectly sculpted and oh-so-submissive wrist with his thumb as he did so. "Sorry. Didn't mean to upset you. Let's declare the game yours for the day before we break something, and I have to special order a new table in case you come over tomorrow. If I rush them, it will probably have a bad surface or something."
Clark looked momentarily -- panicky? -- ashamed? -- at the mention of breaking something, and Lex sighed. You couldn't say ANYTHING to the kid without inducing a guilt complex. "Clark. I was kidding. There are times when I'm tempted to take a sledgehammer to everything in this phony castle, and when I do, you're invited to help."
Clark managed a weak smile at that. "I'll take the front door. I hate that camera."
Lex clapped him on the shoulder. (Oh, damn, the temptation, to move his hand up just a little, trace fingertips over that fine, strong, not-quite-adult jawline.... SUCH a classic work of art.) "A superb ambition. I'll loan you my pipe wrench. Not that you'd need it."
That frozen expression of odd, embarrassed panic again, immediately suppressed, probably totally unnoticed by anyone less suspicious than a Luthor. Okay, Clark was better at concealing the truth than Lex had given him credit for. It was as if he wore his surface emotions on his face in all the colors of the rainbow, in order to keep something buried so deeply that he was afraid to even have it hinted at. Something to do with breaking things.
"Wh-why do you say that?"
Lex met his nervousness with a guileless smile, long practiced, totally false. Maybe he should work on teaching Clark to hide his emotions better. "You have your own farm tools, right? No doubt they include something that could do a better job on that camera than a pipe wrench."
Clark's relaxation was palpable. His openly relieved smile made Lex's look like a grimace. It lit up the room. "Well, sure. There's all the stuff we use to work on the tractors."
"Heh. Just don't let your dad catch you. He'll be convinced I'm trying to steal your tractors or something." Clark actually chuckled at the image of Lex on a tractor. "I better go pretend to do some paperwork to justify the obscene amounts of money I'm going to throw around making the quarterback look foolish." At Clark's automatic worried objection, Lex held up a hand. "That's one of my simpler pleasures, Clark. Don't deny me my fun and games, or I might have to go to Metropolis to pursue less wholesome pursuits."
"I wouldn't want you to do that," Clark said seriously.
"See? I know how to manipulate you every time. You have so many weak spots, Clark, it'll be a miracle if you get through high school." And the look THAT earned him was -- unreadable. Resigned? Where did a high school kid get off, looking resigned? It was actually an effort for Lex to keep his voice light. "See you tomorrow for another game?"
That totally open vulnerable smile again, that hid the depths of the ocean. "Sure."
And Clark was gone (hell, no wonder the kid was in such good shape, he jogged from the farm to the mansion), and Lex was left with another piece of the puzzle that was his friend.
It never even occurred to him to let the puzzle alone. Luthors never let ANYTHING alone. If someone was going to be associated with them, then that person had better be prepared to deal with the demanding nature of the born conquerors.
Clark was afraid of something. Breaking things. Lana. A secret. Hm.
Who, or what, would be afraid of his own strength, and of his attraction to a girl? And why? Lex's superbly endowed and well-trained memory flipped through innumerable legends. Beings whose hormones triggered unnatural strength. Or to whom women had proven a downfall. Hmm.
He knew Clark was astonishingly strong. The kid had hauled two full grown men up from dangling in mid air, although he had looked sick to his stomach, no doubt from the effort and adrenalin rush of fear, for most of an hour afterward. Of course, Clark had grown up on a farm, he probably bench pressed a cow every morning before breakfast.
So what was it about Lana that turned him into such a wimp?
Lex couldn't be sure, not having been through any such experiences himself even in all his travels and travails, but he had his suspicions.
Raiding Nell's house would have been child's play for Lex since junior high. But since he could afford to, he simply hired a pro to bring him what he wanted.
And this time, he was going to make sure Clark had to return it to her personally.
"Got a present for you," Lex told Clark when he showed up for their appointed game the next day. His smirk would have had to be more subtle to be compared to a shark's grin.
Clark eyes the box warily. He couldn't see through it -- or, more precisely, he couldn't see anything in it. He wasn't real clear on the limits of his x-ray perceptions yet. It wasn't like normal vision, where something was either there or it wasn't. At x-ray, something could be either blocked or not there at all. "What is it?" The first thing that came to mind, of course, was the worst of all possibilities he could imagine. No matter how good a friend Lex was, he was also a Luthor, and everything was fair game. If Lex knew about the meteorites....
"Just open it." Lex handed the distrustful teen the box and leaned back, arms crossed, a hard smile on his face and his finger on the control for the remote camera. "It's something Lana -- lost. That you can give back to her."
Clark swallowed and braced himself before he lifted the lid, prepared to slam it shut again and make the usual excuses through the expected pain and sickness.
Clark's reaction was all Lex could have hoped for. Clark shrieked and threw himself backwards, dropping the box, hand thrown up before his eyes as if to keep from seeing. He staggered into a chair so hard it went over upside down, dumping him on the floor. Anyone else would have been pinned under it, but Clark's paralysis was purely emotional.
Lex snickered and scooped up the contents as he approached the terrified teen, eyes glinting with amused malice, and a smile of pure calculating Alexanderian evil curving his lips, as he dropped Lana's pink satin lace thong bikini and bra onto Clark's horrified face.
Timeline: very early in the first season, soon after Lex found Lana's little-green-rock necklace in the cornfield, and handed it over to Clark to give back to her so he could win her over from the mean old quarterback who strung him up, but Clark left it hanging on her front door, since he couldn't exactly hand it to her in person. Strategist Lex doesn't like having his plans thwarted.
Disclaimer: Don't own nothing except my toothbrush, class ring, and opinions.
Weakness
The cue ball clicked and deflected nicely off its intended mark, which rolled into a pocket and left the cue ball set up for another easy shot. Lex shook his head in frustrated admiration. "How do you do it? Took me years and three instructors to learn that."
The taller boy smiled shyly. "I have my own good instructor in you, Lex."
"And a computer for a brain, no doubt. You probably aced geometry in your sleep."
"Well ... yeah, I guess. Math comes easy for me." Clark ducked his head and concentrated on the set-up. For one second, Lex thought he saw the innocently smiling eyes change, become something sad and old and tired, hopeless and far away. Clark shifted position and went for an impossible double-rebound, missing the easy shot that a five-year-old could have made. He sighed and stepped back with a shrug. "Guess I screwed that one up."
Lex narrowed his own eyes. Anyone who couldn't tell that he had missed deliberately was too stupid to be allowed an opinion. Why, Clark? he wanted to demand. Why do you handicap yourself like this? He pursed his lips and gave his own shot only halfhearted attention. He sunk the red ball, but was left with no possible next shots, so just took out his frustrations with his friend's evasiveness and incomprehensibility on a wild hard abuse of the cue ball. "Trust me, I would have known if Lana Lang had come into the mansion. Or does just the thought of her do that to you?"
"Wha- what?" Lex definitely saw the innocently friendly face go pale. Clark couldn't play poker if his life depended on it. "What are you talking about?"
Lex snorted. "My plant manager Gabe Sullivan's daughter is a friend of yours, I believe. She regales him with dinnertime tales of the Lana and Clark show, which for some reason he feels compelled to repeat whenever things are going smoothly. Mixed blessings, that. Sometimes I'd rather he had a crisis to attend to. According to him, as according to her, you lose all semblance of your usual grace when in the presence of the cheerleader."
Clark bit his lip, but rather than blush as Lex had expected, he was still pale. "I'm really just naturally clumsy. All knees and elbows, you know? I got my growth early."
"Which certainly explains why you beat me three times out of five at a game of coordination and skill which I had to teach you from scratch." Lex hadn't grown up a Luthor without being able to tell when someone was lying, much less so inexpert a liar as Clark. "My bet is that the cheerleader you're still admiring from afar and her quarterback still occupy a certain amount of attention that should be on other things. Like walking and remembering where you're supposed to be going at the same time."
"Well ... yes. I can't deny that."
"Clark. Either get over it or make your move. I know it's difficult for high schoolers to believe, but no girl is worth tripping over your own feet or carrying a hopeless torch for. If you think it's hopeless, then quit torturing yourself and move on."
Clark turned back to the billiard table, and gave himself away with a tightening of his lips and a harder-than-necessary whack of the cue ball. Harder than Lex had done, in fact. To Lex's astonishment, two of his target balls went slamming into their pockets.
Clark took a deep breath and visibly worked hard to get himself back under control. Lex revised his estimate of Clark's ability to keep a poker face. He was upset enough about something to let the mask he'd been wearing slip, and therefore reveal that the calm and the excuses had been a mask. There was something else involved on the Lana front.
"This wouldn't have something to do with her necklace, would it?" he prodded gently, at a guess. "Did you give it back to her and not get the reaction you should have?"
Clark spun on him with an expression of emotion so mixed and intense that Lex was actually at a loss to read it. Then he slumped. "Yes. I gave it back to her. And yes. She thought it was from Whitney. I didn't -- stick around."
What the HELL...? "You didn't give it to her with your own hands and tell her everything? Clark, I've been known to do some clueless things in my time, but leaving the keys in the Ferrari on the streets of downtown Metropolis overnight is not one of them. How could you just throw away that whole situation? You had the quarterback dead to rights."
Clark turned away and closed his eyes, leaving his face in profile. "I -- I couldn't."
Damn, but the kid was beautiful. Lex wanted to have him sculpted in bronze. With gold and gemstone highlights. How could anyone be so utterly unaware the effect he had on other people? Must be from living in a barn with only chickens and cows for company.
"You couldn't what? Take advantage of the fact that the girl you want might get angry at her jock of a boyfriend for treating her precious necklace like a worthless bauble, as well as nearly crucifying you? Clark, if you can't do something that plain and simple, you certainly shouldn't be hanging out with a Luthor."
Clark just bowed his head. There was no way to ever explain to Lex. Or to Lana. Or even to his parents, really, though at least they could understand why it was impossible for him to hand Lana her necklace in person. He still had the lead box, after all. But it would have been ... awkward.
Lex just shook his head. Clark's seemingly-ingrained convictions of what he should and shouldn't do were only one more of those things that made him want to take the all too unworldly farmboy under his wing and teach him how to survive in the brutal real world.
Yet every time he thought Clark couldn't surprise him any further with his naivety, Clark proved to actually know what was going on. And every time Clark seemed to have a clue, the kid went into what Gabe Sullivan had referred to with a snicker as "Lana-mode."
It was as if just being around Lana, or even anything associated with her, like that cheap meteorite necklace, made him panicky and weak and unable to think straight.
Lex settled for reaching over and gently removing the cue stick from Clark's unresisting hand, though it was positive effort not to stroke the boy's perfectly sculpted and oh-so-submissive wrist with his thumb as he did so. "Sorry. Didn't mean to upset you. Let's declare the game yours for the day before we break something, and I have to special order a new table in case you come over tomorrow. If I rush them, it will probably have a bad surface or something."
Clark looked momentarily -- panicky? -- ashamed? -- at the mention of breaking something, and Lex sighed. You couldn't say ANYTHING to the kid without inducing a guilt complex. "Clark. I was kidding. There are times when I'm tempted to take a sledgehammer to everything in this phony castle, and when I do, you're invited to help."
Clark managed a weak smile at that. "I'll take the front door. I hate that camera."
Lex clapped him on the shoulder. (Oh, damn, the temptation, to move his hand up just a little, trace fingertips over that fine, strong, not-quite-adult jawline.... SUCH a classic work of art.) "A superb ambition. I'll loan you my pipe wrench. Not that you'd need it."
That frozen expression of odd, embarrassed panic again, immediately suppressed, probably totally unnoticed by anyone less suspicious than a Luthor. Okay, Clark was better at concealing the truth than Lex had given him credit for. It was as if he wore his surface emotions on his face in all the colors of the rainbow, in order to keep something buried so deeply that he was afraid to even have it hinted at. Something to do with breaking things.
"Wh-why do you say that?"
Lex met his nervousness with a guileless smile, long practiced, totally false. Maybe he should work on teaching Clark to hide his emotions better. "You have your own farm tools, right? No doubt they include something that could do a better job on that camera than a pipe wrench."
Clark's relaxation was palpable. His openly relieved smile made Lex's look like a grimace. It lit up the room. "Well, sure. There's all the stuff we use to work on the tractors."
"Heh. Just don't let your dad catch you. He'll be convinced I'm trying to steal your tractors or something." Clark actually chuckled at the image of Lex on a tractor. "I better go pretend to do some paperwork to justify the obscene amounts of money I'm going to throw around making the quarterback look foolish." At Clark's automatic worried objection, Lex held up a hand. "That's one of my simpler pleasures, Clark. Don't deny me my fun and games, or I might have to go to Metropolis to pursue less wholesome pursuits."
"I wouldn't want you to do that," Clark said seriously.
"See? I know how to manipulate you every time. You have so many weak spots, Clark, it'll be a miracle if you get through high school." And the look THAT earned him was -- unreadable. Resigned? Where did a high school kid get off, looking resigned? It was actually an effort for Lex to keep his voice light. "See you tomorrow for another game?"
That totally open vulnerable smile again, that hid the depths of the ocean. "Sure."
And Clark was gone (hell, no wonder the kid was in such good shape, he jogged from the farm to the mansion), and Lex was left with another piece of the puzzle that was his friend.
It never even occurred to him to let the puzzle alone. Luthors never let ANYTHING alone. If someone was going to be associated with them, then that person had better be prepared to deal with the demanding nature of the born conquerors.
Clark was afraid of something. Breaking things. Lana. A secret. Hm.
Who, or what, would be afraid of his own strength, and of his attraction to a girl? And why? Lex's superbly endowed and well-trained memory flipped through innumerable legends. Beings whose hormones triggered unnatural strength. Or to whom women had proven a downfall. Hmm.
He knew Clark was astonishingly strong. The kid had hauled two full grown men up from dangling in mid air, although he had looked sick to his stomach, no doubt from the effort and adrenalin rush of fear, for most of an hour afterward. Of course, Clark had grown up on a farm, he probably bench pressed a cow every morning before breakfast.
So what was it about Lana that turned him into such a wimp?
Lex couldn't be sure, not having been through any such experiences himself even in all his travels and travails, but he had his suspicions.
Raiding Nell's house would have been child's play for Lex since junior high. But since he could afford to, he simply hired a pro to bring him what he wanted.
And this time, he was going to make sure Clark had to return it to her personally.
"Got a present for you," Lex told Clark when he showed up for their appointed game the next day. His smirk would have had to be more subtle to be compared to a shark's grin.
Clark eyes the box warily. He couldn't see through it -- or, more precisely, he couldn't see anything in it. He wasn't real clear on the limits of his x-ray perceptions yet. It wasn't like normal vision, where something was either there or it wasn't. At x-ray, something could be either blocked or not there at all. "What is it?" The first thing that came to mind, of course, was the worst of all possibilities he could imagine. No matter how good a friend Lex was, he was also a Luthor, and everything was fair game. If Lex knew about the meteorites....
"Just open it." Lex handed the distrustful teen the box and leaned back, arms crossed, a hard smile on his face and his finger on the control for the remote camera. "It's something Lana -- lost. That you can give back to her."
Clark swallowed and braced himself before he lifted the lid, prepared to slam it shut again and make the usual excuses through the expected pain and sickness.
Clark's reaction was all Lex could have hoped for. Clark shrieked and threw himself backwards, dropping the box, hand thrown up before his eyes as if to keep from seeing. He staggered into a chair so hard it went over upside down, dumping him on the floor. Anyone else would have been pinned under it, but Clark's paralysis was purely emotional.
Lex snickered and scooped up the contents as he approached the terrified teen, eyes glinting with amused malice, and a smile of pure calculating Alexanderian evil curving his lips, as he dropped Lana's pink satin lace thong bikini and bra onto Clark's horrified face.