"Why do you have my medical records?" He asks in quiet, lethal tones.

"Lex. What a nice surprise," Tony greets, standing and wiping his hands on a grease-streaked towel. He doesn't look nervous; he certainly doesn't look guilty.

It's been a month since Tony's visit to Metropolis, and even though the progress on the power grid restructuring project has been encouraging, they haven't spoken for the better part of three weeks. If Lex were paranoid—or honest, a deep and nasty part of him supplies—he'd almost entertain the idea that Tony is avoiding him.

Radio silence is not something Lex generally encounters or tolerates, and while Tony organizes the packets and papers currently fanned out over a scarred metal desk, Lex takes a moment to pointedly reaffirm that he is not a man guided by his fixations and obsessions. This is a thing he tells himself often and harshly, because he used to be that man. It hadn't ended well.

His mental checklist to rein in his—tendencies—goes something like, Are my actions consistent with the information I have been given; Am I rationalizing unusual activity to resolve a perceived or irrelevant conflict; Is my behavior contextually appropriate.

As it stands, Lex has taken no action other than to notice that Tony has not contacted him; Lex has official business in New York, and certainly did not make a special effort to confront Tony; their last conversation was perfectly amicable, so there was no reason not to pay a visit to Avengers Tower. It would have been rude if he didn't, given that he's already in New York.

So here is Tony, dressed down in old jeans and a Black Sabbath t-shirt, a grimy billionaire in a vast underground garage that doubles as a workshop. He isn't anything like most other people that Lex has the displeasure of working with. He does exactly at he pleases, at home in his own space. It's a comfort, and a welcome change, to see that there are still real people in the world.

What is not welcome is the fact that Tony's going over documents which Lex knows for a fact were sealed or destroyed years ago. The Belle Reve logo glares out at the world next to Luthor, Lex and electroshock therapy.

"Coffee?" Tony asks idly, navigating the furious silence with a practiced ease.

"Stark," Lex says crisply.

Tony's shoulders stiffen. "Not that again. We were doing so well," he sighs, hands quick and sure with a couple of mismatched mugs and what is presumably an elaborate espresso machine. It appears to be under construction, complicated circuitry gleaming out from the open casing. "Sit down, will you? I feel like you're about to go for my throat."

Lex seethes quietly. Then he grinds his teeth. Then he takes a seat on the long, sturdy-looking workbench.

"So this might not be awesome," Tony said, "But it should be fantastic. I just invented it. Hopefully it will taste like unicorns and magic and childhood, but if it tastes like dirt, that's because it's—uh—cafe nouveau. Very high-end."

Lex takes the mug and holds it in his hands, the warmth seeping into his fingers.

Tony settles next to him on the bench, near enough that their shoulders touch. It's not really big enough for two people. Lex thinks about moving away, but that's as far as he gets—Tony has a talent for creeping into your personal space and staying there.

It's not as if we're friends, Lex thinks angrily. It was a handful of days; he's spent exponentially more time than that in the company of people he detests.

But it's possible he's gotten the wrong idea—Tony basically giving away his product, Tony dragging him out to a bar, to dinner. The strange, haphazard phone calls for the first week before they steadily dwindled to nothing.

Lex hadn't realized how much he appreciated the interruptions until he'd gone four straight hours without looking up from his computer screen.

"Those records were sealed," he manages steadily.

"I had to do some digging," Tony admits.

Lex waits.

"So, uh. Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what it looks like." He shrugs, the motion stilted and close, and he glances furtively at Lex's face before taking a sip of his coffee. Then he glances down, surprised, and takes another. "Not bad."

Lex frowns severely.

"I was curious about you," Tony murmurs. "I know that, um, most people don't feel the need to exhaustively compile information on their business associates. But. We all have our little quirks, and you're—no offense, but you're pretty much on lockdown. You're a fascinating guy, Lex."

"You were curious," Lex echoes, bemused, "so you hacked into one of the most elusive high-security mental health facilities in the States, recovered purged data—"

"I never said the work wasn't cut out for me, but—"

"—and treated it as breakfast reading material." Lex purses his lips. There's a twinge in his temple; he feels a headache coming on. He gets them so rarely that it's more than a passing irritation. "Am I to assume you also have a secret stockpile of related news articles and court records somewhere?"

"Well yeah, I took care of the light research before I met with you." He pauses critically. "You mean you don't? I had you pegged as the must-possess-all-variables type. It's really gonna wreck my worldview if I find out you're not."

Lex wets his lips, caught off-guard, and goes over a short list of possible responses. He chooses none of them, instead following a strange new inclination to tell the truth. "There have been people in my life who did not take kindly to my—investigative tendencies. I have since tried to limit the compulsion."

Tony's fingers flutter thoughtfully on his coffee mug, reminding Lex to take a sip of his own. It's—actually very good. Strong, bracing, but without a bitter aftertaste. He takes a second, longer drink and holds it in his mouth like fine wine.

"Pepper never liked me checking up on her, either," Tony mentions. "Clearly we've been hanging out with the wrong crowd."

"You could have asked," Lex hears himself say.

"Funnily enough, I don't think you would've been very forthcoming. But this is better—can we talk about what a fucking monster Lionel Luthor was?"

Lex lowers his cup and stares at him.

"I just mean," Tony says, not half as awkward as he should be, "I would have hated knowing and not actually being able to ask about it. He was the one who checked you in—did he really order electroshock therapy? I thought my dad sucked."

"Lionel Luthor," Lex says carefully, "blamed me for my infant brother's death from the time I was nine years old. He would periodically use it as a source of trauma to trigger panic attacks, delusions, and mental breakdowns. He fed my paranoia to keep me under his thumb—," Lex meets Tony's eyes, steady and unyielding, "—but mostly it just caused me to became aggressively thorough at compiling blackmail material."

Tony sets his coffee on the worktable.

"Eventually I found out that he murdered his parents."

Tony swallows very carefully.

"He ordered the electroshock therapy to erase the weeks leading up to that discovery from my memory. Then he destroyed the evidence I had collected."

"My dad never loved me," Tony says. "But, I mean. He just ignored me most of the time, he never—never fucked around with my psyche."

"I'm aware," Lex says, suddenly tired.

"So. When you were poisoned. After Lionel went to prison? There's a footnote about some kind of seventy-two-hour blood purification process—"

"Mmhmm," Lex murmurs.

"Are you a mutant? Do you have a healing factor?" Tony asks. Lex glances at him, raising his eyebrows. No one has ever come right out and asked before.

"I'm not a mutant. Not in the way you mean," he says. "You've heard of the Smallville meteor shower?"

"Oh. One of those," Tony says, fidgeting. "Is it like—Wolverine?"

"If only," Lex half-smiles. "It's not even like Captain America. I never get sick and I metabolize toxins very quickly, but I only heal about twice as fast as normal."

"Can I buy you dinner?" Tony asks suddenly.

Lex opens his mouth. Lex closes his mouth.

"I feel pretty shitty about all this," Tony says. "I guess I just assumed you'd be doing the same thing."

Lex takes another sip of his coffee. At home on his personal computer, behind an eight-point security system with a fifteen minute decryption delay, there is an AVI file of Tony in Afghanistan. He's surrounded by masked men with guns, and there's blood on his chest soaking through hastily-wrapped bandages. He has cuts on his face and a black eye. Lex has transcripts of the original rough Arabic alongside two alternate translations in English.

In that same folder, there is security footage of the Mark One. The video quality is exceedingly poor, but every Mark file after that—up to and including a fireworks display on an oil tanker off the Miami coastline—is more than clear enough for practical reference. Lex is currently having a template prepared from one of the Mark Forty-Two stills for a commissioned wall mural.

The other videos—Tony at parties with starlets, Tony in hot tubs with models, Tony with persons indeterminate in the back seats of limos or, in at least one recorded instance, on the hood of a Maserati—provide nothing about him that isn't already general knowledge, other than a nice view.

"I can't," Lex finally says. "My schedule is locked up tight for the next few days. One of our larger accounts is changing hands. I'm only in town to charm the new management into renewing their LexCorp contracts."

"When are you leaving?"

"Wednesday night. Hosting a charity gala on Thursday."

Tony stands up to tinker restlessly with the espresso machine, movements brief and aimless as though he needs something to do with his hands . "Well, what are you doing right now?"

Lex presses his lips together thoughtfully. He has a business trip to be getting on with, and Tony at a slight disadvantage now that he believes he's misjudged Lex. Oddly, Lex doesn't feel any surging desire to capitalize on this.

Ultimately he decides, in one fell swoop, to forgive Tony's trespasses by revealing his own: "I was hoping you would tell me about Extremis."


"I mean, I already had the working equation—I had to come up with it to neutralize Pepper—so I thought, well, as long as it's here and I'm not weaponizing it, why not?"

It's getting on eleven, and Lex has to be at a lunch meeting in an hour. The reminder is persistent, but ultimately background noise to the frantic possibilities twisting together in his mind. "Personal use."

Tony rolls his eyes. "Don't make it sound worse than it is. I'm not patenting it. I'm not releasing the data. And it seemed like a really good idea at the time—"

" Like detonating the Iron Man suits?" Lex sips his delicious approximation of a mocha latte, vaguely in awe of a coffeemaker that accepts whatever random ingredients the user decides to experiment with—in this instance, Belgian chocolate—and automatically reconfigures itself to construct an optimum flavor profile. He wonders if Tony will considering selling it, or if Lex will have to steal it.

"Kind of the same story, really." Tony shrugs, his shoulder hitching in a way that's anything but careless. "The arc reactor was basically a keystone for the worst parts of our relationship . Anyway, with Extremis regenerating the damaged tissue, it was finally possible to extract the shrapnel. " He smiles flatly. "Seems to've fixed up my liver, too, god knows that was on its last leg."

The possibilities are endless: superhuman augmentation; anti-aging serums; limb, organ, and tissue regeneration. "Have you thought about—"

"No," Tony says firmly, shooting him a sharp look. "Stop. I can see your antivillain brain folding all over itself from here. Quit hatching nefarious plots to steal money from old ladies by offering them eternal youth."

"I don't see how a fair deal is stealing—"

"It's off the table, Lex," Tony says. "Do you want to stay at the Tower while you're in New York?"

Lex stares at him, completely derailed, and scrambles to reassemble an idea about Extremis and applied nanotechnology. "What?"

"We could have breakfast or something," Tony says, "one of these days. Since you have dinner meetings every night. Maybe watch a movie." At Lex's incredulous expression, he quickly adds, "Or work quietly on our separate professional tasks in the same office. You know. Just hang out."

Tony isn't looking at him. Lex can't look away.

"No," he says slowly. Then he reaches out and touches Tony's shoulder, which has dipped alarmingly. "But I will the next time I'm in town. We can do those things."

Tony glances up from his orange-chocolate-peppermint chimera-coffee. There's a bit of foam on the corner of his mouth.

"If you want," Lex clarifies.

Tony sips his drink, licking his lips clean. Then he nods, stiff and businesslike and very obviously pleased. "Consider it a standing offer."


The problem with charity functions is that hosting one presents a neatly gift-wrapped opportunity for criminal attacks on your person. Specifically, Lex thinks around the cold circle of metal shoved up under his jaw, abduction for ransom.

He's had enough guns in his face to last a dozen lifetimes. He finds the exercise tacky and graceless, and its frequency in his life a great source of irritation.

At least they scaled the walls instead of coming in through the mansion. He's grown quite attached to the Persian carpets, and marble is criminally easy to clean by comparison.

"You're making a mistake," Lex mentions, bored out of his mind. "I don't think I'm the man you're looking for." There are three figures on the balcony with him, dressed seamlessly in black. One of them locks the ornate French doors while Lex's guests carry on, oblivious, just inside. It's for the best; the fewer involved, the better.

Mercy has undoubtedly noted his absence, and will make his excuses while unobtrusively radioing his security detail. In the event of an emergency or complication, her orders are explicit: any and all LexCorp functions will continue on entirely as intended, and Lex himself will be safely retrieved before any lasting damage is done. She does not have the luxury of prioritizing.

One of the two men—he thinks the third might be female, but it's difficult to tell—moves behind him to bind his wrists. Lex wonders how long this will take; he has a seven o'clock meeting tomorrow morning with one of Tony's contractors.

"If I am the man you are looking for," Lex continues conversationally, casually baiting them in a vain effort to hurry this along, "you're either debilitatingly stupid or imminently suicidal. I trust you realize you're being appallingly underpaid for this venture."

Cue cold-coking, Lex thinks blearily, pain blooming high on his cheek. He probably ought to know better by now.

Guns in my face. Guns on my face, he adds to the growing list of things he no longer cares to experience. The world flickers and fades to black.


In the dream, he's ten years younger and waking up on slick, wet dirt. It's a cold day, overcast, and Clark's hovering over him like a Renaissance angel. Cherubic curls and flush lips, eyes so impossibly sincere that they come out the other side of what it means to be honest: you chase it down, you do everything you can to get your hands on it, but the truth only leads you at top speed into a brick wall. And not even once are you ever allowed to touch it. You never even get close.

Lex, clammy and aching on the bank, his lungs on fire, his clothes clinging heavy and wet to his hollowed-out body, breathes in deep. Something familiar and new shivers just beneath the flesh of his lips.

Clark watches him. Lex hadn't understood, before, about blue eyes: how they're constructed from the atmospheres of distant worlds, how they leak into your chest and soothe you, overtake you. How you're eviscerated at length until you seek their approval and love, and how those things become as vital to you as sunlight and air and water.

He hadn't known. And then this awful, beautiful, infuriating and flawless kid came into his life, and even in the waking world, Lex doesn't have it in him to wish they'd never met.

All he can do is ask, in this place that belongs to nothing and no one but a shocked brain's random access memory: Do you regret it?

Clark, the Clark who saw Lex for the first time and saved his life—the Clark ignorant of everything that comes after—this Clark says, There was more to us than the bad parts.

Says, There's us and there's us.

He touches Lex's face. Lex wakes up.

Close and curving above him, taking up the whole of Lex's vision, Clark is here with him on this side of things, too.