He figured out that they cycle every one hundred forty years or so, this love-hate-love-hate thing he shares with Clark, the longest relationship he has ever found himself in. He has charts and simulations to prove it, too. At the core of his company's mainframe is a small file that charts the length of time he has spent on earth, a neat chronology of his life since his second lease of life on a bridge several lifetimes ago.
It is proof of how two beings, never human and never anything else, can hate and love so completely. Never really knowing why they moved on from one state to another. He gave it a little thought once, ended up being so drunk he was robbed three times in two days. And since it was their hate phase, help came too late like a sinister lesson he somehow had to learn.
There were days that they only lived and breathed anger, and there were nights when they only consider regret as a price they're willing to pay. To be honest, he was at his most creative at that time. His lab would turn into a patent machine, making things none in several galaxies ever knew they needed. Working stopped himself from feeling and the adulation of crowds his only fuel. Yet, at its height were desires so overwhelming that they could do nothing but succumb to passion, then love. And then to love so completely that each-really never one to be brought up completely optimistic-would begin to look around corners for the other shoe to drop.
Around the time of their first reconciliation, they swore to stop being so paranoid. Not that it was worth the air they breathed out, since both the Kents and Luthors brought their children up with their special brew of skepticism and secrecy. Love made them jittery, seeing ghosts and apparitions and motives that were not there. Finding and making problems that were not there, sealing their own downfalls like nothing else could.
Being in love made them wonder if there should be more, if they could push the boundaries of love even more than they already had. The perils of living forever, he thought. Years never mellowed them down. It just made them more obsessive. So the inevitable happened, as dumb as self-sabotage, as inescapable as... Well.
Today is a day in a string of love days. Somewhere on a nice little plateau of quiet idyllic days. Ringing in the new year's eve. Another year gone.
"I'm glad we're together this whole year," Clark says, low and fleeting, his last syllables already disappearing into dark corners.
He can only hum his reply, doesn't really know how to otherwise. What do you say, without succumbing to centuries-old platitudes? "There's not one good breakup record released all year at all."
"Even The Solarbunnies?" Clark asks, genuinely curious and uncaring at the same time.
Ten years ago, Clark came across a girl who looked like someone he had known a long time ago, the lead singer of a virtualska band. He bought an arena recording of their sophomore album. Lex didn't like the sound, but found out that the singer was a descendant of one of his ex-wives, though born and raised on Mars. Not by him, much to Clark's unexpected delight. Time had dulled the memories of that disastrous marriage, or at least it made him care even less about the past he no longer knew. The band matured, and Lex found himself buying them their own recording label for their fifth album.
"Especially them. Tis a bad year for them." Lex has always said that sunspots are bad for Martian songsmithing.
"Yeah. Don't think they'll be winning any prizes come award season." This Clark Kent is a journalist, less on the investigative side and more toward celebrities, music, and the perils of pop culture. Less of getting shot at and more of the traveling across the universe covering concerts in his patented color-blind hippie reporter getup and getting off his face on Janx Spirit.
Lex chuckles at the image from not too long ago. Clark coming back as pissed as a hothouse parrot one Winter's afternoon, the only color in the expanse of white and gunmetal gray. Clark must've developed telepathy because there is a matching chuckle that hangs low off the ceiling.
"Do you think this is it, finally? I feel like I can go on forever like this." Clark's words crisscross between the echoes of their laughter.
"Like what?" Lex isn't sure that he wants to hear the answer.
"Like this. Loving you, being with you. I hope we die loving each other."
Some days Clark sounds and looks like he was way back in the day. And Lex will feel like he is cradle robbing all over again. Jonathan Kent once said to him-during a rare, apology-filled speech many years ago-that he often forgot how fifteen and twenty one weren't a lot at all, didn't even know why he had harbored such animosity to a kid barely out of college. Then again, Lex was never young. Not really.
He remembers feeling bitter. But that was a very long time ago, so Lex isn't even sure what he should be thinking today.
"Does it really matter?" Lex wonders, probably out loud. "What's the worst that can happen, anyway?" He feels like they have cycled through so many permutations, everything has become more mundane, seems less unpredictable.
"That we die giving up on each other?" It is a question that Clark is pushing out of his lips, merely a question that shouldn't carry so much desolation in its wake. And there's suddenly a desperate need to make this better, even though Lex has no idea what 'this' is.
"Like that is a possibility. I don't think giving up is in the Luthor Handbook."
"Really? What if..." Clark is not willing to let go of it yet, even if he can't find the words for it. Yet.
There have been times when Lex can lie to himself about the reality of Clark Kent-wholesome, guileless, a savior worthy of every inch of Spandex he still wears. But there are also times when Clark shows how he is Lex's equal in every way, in each obsession, in each dogged stubbornness, especially now that he's not so sensitive to Kryptonite anymore.
"I don't know," Lex cuts quickly, "Can't say I'm looking forward to that particular end." Lex will have to come up with a distraction. Or Clark will, given the right motivation.
The room is dark, wide and womb-like at the same time. No light fixtures, no windows, nothing that can tell time, or tell them anything really. Yet, they can still feel it-the minuscule shift of time, like the cold marble floor beneath their backs and outstretched limbs. If he tries, he might hear the organic groan and shift of marble's crystal veins. Doesn't know when they've perfected their internal clocks, but they know another year has definitely passed, that if they step outside the door they can see for themselves a new year dawning.
But it has been years since tangible celebrations matter. Lex thinks of them as the artificial timekeeping of frightened humans with limited time on earth.
In the end, Lex thinks as he turns to his side, meeting Clark's familiar heat over such a small space between them, nothing really matters.