CHAPTER 3

Lana's recriminations over her family had made her so restless that she soon gave up, lying down quietly on her wide, lonely bed. She resigned herself to waiting up her husband and daughter curled up reading a Victorian poetry book, but time seemed to pass very slowly until, finally, she heard a rumour announcing a car parking in their yard.
Frozen, with her book opened on her lap, Lana waited motionlessly. Then, Mrs Luthor realized she had no idea of what exactly she was waiting for; so she rose and slipped behind the bedroom door, refusing to wonder why she was opening it so quietly.
It was a strange relief to hear Lucine's distinctive, light footsteps in the hallway… her daughter was bound to pass in front of her parents' room to reach hers.

"Lucine," Lana called in a low voice which, nonetheless, startled the approaching red-haired girl.

"Mom! Have I awakened you?"

"No, ¨ Lana cleared her throat, suddenly too dry, ¨ have you had fun?"

Lucine shrugged, tilting her head to one side in a manner reminiscent of Lex when he was speculating, as if she were considering which answer would get her into less trouble.

" I didn´t get bored. The Baroness has a daughter of my age who studies in a Swiss boarding school. She let me try her piano. "

"I'm glad," Lana murmured with a forced smile. "I wish I could have come with you. You look very pretty"

"Thank you."

"Where's your dad?"

"Downstairs. He stopped by his study."

Probably delaying the moment he would have to share his breathing space with his wife, Lana thought with a sting of bitterness.

Meeting her daughter's dark eyes, so much like hers, Mrs. Luthor pushed away the resentful thought.

"Go to bed now. Tomorrow morning I will come to wake you up early. I want you to help me bake gingerbread and take over the cuisine before Elise tries to stop and delay us. "

Lana noticed she was babbling, considering the sheer impossibility in those last lines. She couldn't imagine their matron-looking but ever-obsequious cook Elise standing in the way of her masters, even if they had expressed their wish to cook roasted waitresses for dinner. It was Lucine's fault, of course. The girl was giving her mother a quizzical look, rather similar to that she had shot when Lex had once painted to their children a vivid picture of Lana's cheerleading and pastel-colored clothes days.

"Gingerbread?"

"Yes, gingerbread. Now go to bed."

"Um, Okay, mom. "

Squaring her shoulders and closing her bedroom door behind her, Lana gazed at her daughter until the darkness of the long hallway swallowed her frame completely. She didn't particularly look forward to apologizing to Lex. This little interlude with Lucine had been awkward enough.

Lana found out that Lex had indeed lingered in his study, trying to drink himself to oblivion. The door was ajar and she could see him downing a shot of scotch. He had slumped with unusual inelegance over the armchair he usually favoured, in front of an unlit fireplace- a pitiful picture, unbecoming to him.

"Are you planning to drink until you pass out here or are you coming to bed? "

Lana was horrified to find her voice had a slightly petulant edge. Lex turned his face toward her, seemingly unsurprised to see her on the threshold. He darted her a bored look, his features twisted in a mask of vaguely hostile superiority. His eyes swept over her petite figure, noticing with disapproval she was probably wearing little under the blue silk dressing which clung to her curves.

"We won't the issue out of our system this time around, Lana"

He said it patronizingly, as if he considered that habit distasteful… as if he hadn't actively encouraged it until not so long ago. .

"I know"

She bit back at him frostily, moving inside the room with a confidence she didn't feel, fighting at every step her instinctive urge to let the matter rest until tomorrow.

The indifference in his gaze before her distress angered her a little, and this fortified her somehow. Wrapping her arms around herself as if to hold on to her own warmth, Lana tried a more cautious approach. She hadn´t come to end the drama or to prolong it.

"I'm not being difficult on purpose Lex. I just… don't want to let him go"

Lex raised his eyebrows mockingly and an arrogant, unhappy smirk formed on his mouth.

"Do you think I want to?"

His grip on the glass in his hand tightened painfully, his knuckles becoming white.

"Every morning I see his chair empty at breakfast and I know it should have been me. But, despite how much I hate not having him there, how much I wish I could take his place, I can't change the fact I failed him. I failed him, when I could have given him all that I have never had. Being sorry doesn't give me the right to drown Lucine in my sorrows. Same goes for you, I'm afraid. "

Lana blinked very slowly, taking it all in. In two years, she had never suspected he was guilt-tripping himself so.

"You can't seriously put the blame on you. You couldn't have protected Alex better unless you had been God. "

"Ah, but I thought I was better than that, didn't I?"

It was painful to hear the self-loathing so apparent in his words. She was able- for a moment- to read with frightening clarity his current train of thought: Superman-if he had fathered a child- would never have allowed him to die.

Lana sprinted forward, overcome by a sudden and raw impulse to hold this man in her arms and never let him go.

She knelt down before her husband and, gently, took the empty glass from his hand, unclenching his fingers one by one. Keeping her tone soft and low, almost as if she were soothing a wild horse, she offered him the only words of comfort he would accept; if only to convince him he wasn't to blame for their son's sad fate.

"We must find a way to go on without torturing ourselves so, Lex , for Lucine at least. I love you both so much, but you were right in telling me I wasn't being fair to you or her. Believe me, the last thing I want is to cause you and her any more pain."

She set the glass on the floor and raised her arms to encircle his broad shoulders. Lex resisted her at first, but then he melted against her body, sliding his arm around her lower back to gather her in his lap.
Lana eased his head on her breast, surprised she could be so aware of the contact between their bodies even while their intimacy had nothing of sexual.

--

For a long time, he lay immobile and boneless in her embrace, but she realized at last that they couldn't stay in that deliciously uncomfortable tangle all night along. She felt pathetically reluctant to disengage herself from it anyway since she knew moments like those were all the more precious because they were so rare. It was hardly likely she would ever enjoy the luxury of seeing her husband showing himself so vulnerable and lost to her eyes again, let alone have the chance to cradle him .
The feeling of his fingers playing idly with locks of her raven hair, of his breath on her naked skin gave her a drowsy sort of gratification.

"Lex? We must go to bed."

"Must we? It's our house after all."

He sounded sleepy, as if all the alcohol in his blood had finally caught up with him and caused him a heavy somnolence. It was probably the case. It wouldn't be the first time.

"You'll thank me tomorrow when your back isn't aching."

Her teasing had made Lex finally raise his head off her chest, but his gaze didn´t focus on her face. She felt his fingertips slowly, gingerly, trailing her skin from her earlobe to her jaw.

He smiled up at her - a tentative, soft , sad and most likely drunken smile- and right then he looked the farthest thing from a remorseless villain or even a ruthless businessman. He looked simply young and lost.

It would have been endearing if it hadn´t been scary.

"If I had believed in happiness, I would have made you happy. All of us, as a matter of fact. "

Confused, Lana shook her head. "We have been happy, Lex"

"We have had moments of ecstasy and contentment in between eras of pandemonium. Don't you ever wonder if we could have had… "

He trailed off, seemingly unsure of how to articulate his ideas. Lana considered it another sign of an increasingly surreal situation. The man she had married wasn't the type to lose his sleep on what-ifs. What was happening to him?

"Nobody who truly knows humanity can be happy all the time. Your words, not mine. Are you feeling all right?"

Lex squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them again, he looked a bit more awake.

"I'm fine. I guess it must have been a longer day than I thought. "

Lana didn't allow him to look away from her, tilting up his chin with one hand while she laid the other on his nape.

"You know what you mean to me. I knew what I was getting into when I chose to share this path with you, and I knew it wouldn't be easy, but I knew I wouldn't regret it either. "

She could tell, from the sudden stillness of Lex's features, that he didn't know anything about it; either about her lack of regrets or about what she owed to him.

"If I look back on my life before you, it looks like a lie. Perhaps it began when my parents died…there was this part of me who was so furious with them for just standing there and staring at the sky waiting to be killed. But everybody coddled me and repeated how miserable I must be and how unfortunate their deaths have been, so I soon felt as if I had no right to feel that way. I didn't think they would love me half that much if I had confessed that little, dirty secret, so I swallowed it and forgot all about it. As I grew up, Smallville kept seeing me as this sweet, pretty, pure angel; but I knew I wasn't that girl. I kept dreaming and waiting for some prince charming to come and rescue me from that image of myself, as if I were a fairytale princess entrapped in an impenetrable tower. "

Irony had coloured her description heavily by its end, and Lana could have laughed at her past naïveté if she hadn't remembered a prince had indeed entered her life and turned it around.

Clark had been her hero- all selflessness, candy-sweet romance and safety- but all he had accomplished was to set higher, thicker walls to her ivory tower. But she didn't need to remind Lex about that part of their history.

"Then I found you and you were no prince. You were the dragon who set my prison on fire. You made me real, Lex. Sometimes I hated you for it, but in the end I had no choice but to love you more for the same reason. "