Notes: This begins in Season Two. Roughly. This is subject to (yet another) rewriting; feel free to point out mistakes!
Masque
Prologue
Watching Lana is like watching a ballet being written. There's something in the way she moves from table to register to the counter that whispers of things not yet finished; it's beauty in transition. Even when she was waitressing and broke the record for number of porcelain dishes shattered in a single afternoon, Lex had found her absent-minded clumsiness intriguing--and amusing, yes, though he'd tried to hide that behind a sympathetic smile.
There isn't anyone he cares about quite the way he cares about Clark, though. He knows why but he never has, and never will, put a real definition to it; he prefers to focus on the things he doesn't know. He doesn't know if they will ever be on the same level. There's a gap between them that has nothing to do with the ways they were raised, or their roles in society, or even the fact that Clark is "different".
Lex doesn't want to boil it down to age, because age has never stopped him from rising up to meet his father or anyone else, and he knows that Clark has the same confidence, or will have one day. And even though he still recognizes some of Clark's distance as 'teenage angst', he knows now there is much more he can't see and can't quite understand, and it tugs with unrelenting impatience at his attention.
Perhaps most frustrating of all is that he feels like the distance has closed only when he is with Lana. It makes no sense, except for one reason which he would refuse to look at if he were another man: Clark wants Lana. Whenever she offers Lex a smile, her honey-hazel eyes warm and friendly or alight with interest, he realizes the distance was not imagined, but it can be erased, if he has the courage to take what his closest friend wants most.
Truth, to Lex, is more valuable than all his possessions--he'd give them all away if he could have the power to know. Truth is the foundation for power, and even this truth, one that he runs from as desperately as he runs from the idea that he is his father's son, is something that he clings to and turns over in his darkest moments.
For now, though, he's sipping at Lana's sadly watered down cappuchino (but she is getting better; there's no peppermint in it, this time) and watching her gossip with Chloe at the counter. He has no interest in what they're saying, until Lana's gaze flits over Chloe's shoulder and brushes against his. ...Still. It's a private conversation. She was probably just surveying the room, checking to see if there were dishes to be cleared away.
He can't help but smile at her, anyway.