Lex decided to wake up! And there was much rejoicing.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin
* * * * *
Lex opened his eyes blearily, terror and confusion and exhaustion warring for the upper hand to the point that he wondered whether he even cared which one won. Before he could scream or strike out or pass out again, a big warm hand touched his, and a familiar voice, a familiar face and scent, slipped into his senses.
"Hey, Lex." Clark's voice was quiet, the smile gentle, the eyebrows turned up in the middle in the familiar apologetic, disarming look. "How're you feeling?"
"Clark?" Lex blinked once, twice, and bit down on his lip. Ah, blood. If this was a hallucination, it was the best one he'd managed yet. "What are you doing here?" He licked his blood, considering the taste as if it were wine, comparing it to memory. His eyes narrowed. "What am I doing here?" Yep, tasted like his own blood, but then, what else would it taste like if this was a hallucination? And besides that and Clark, absolutely nothing was familiar. "Where is here?"
Clark actually had the nerve to chuckle. "You're not going to believe this. You're in the back room of the headquarters for one of the men running for the presidency."
Lex closed his eyes. He breathed in, deeply, held it while he thought, let it out. "Okay, this is clearly reality. No hallucination of even my father at his worst would make up something like that. The Clark I know wouldn't even be able to read that line with a straight face." He peered up suspiciously at the younger man. "Are you the Clark I know?"
Clark hesitated at that. The question was loaded like a string of cheap landmines sitting in a puddle of nitroglycerine. "I'm the same Clark you've always known," he countered finally, and even to him it sounded lame.
Lex sighed tiredly and closed his eyes again. "Yeah, you are. Never a straight answer." Another stab of unreasoning fear roiled through him, competing with exasperation and anger this time. Clark would sit there and cheerfully tell him that he was sleeping in a presidential candidate's bed, but he wouldn't just say, of course I'm Clark, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Well, in the immortal words of Harlan Ellison, f*** that s#**. "So how did I get here?"
Clark came back on track, having a question he could answer without evasion. "We found out your dad was drugging you and had you locked up, and we basically busted you out. I couldn't take you back to the farm or the mansion, Lionel or Edge's people would both come looking for you there within a day. This seemed like a safer place to hide out for awhile."
Lionel already had come looking. Jonathan had faced him down with the shotgun not exactly pointed, but not exactly at parade rest, either. It wasn't too suspicious for the son to stand behind instead of beside his armed father, close enough for support but not the one in direct confrontation.
But he doubted that Lionel was fooled. The wily old mad had all but lined his jacket with chips of refined green crystal. Clark had been too dizzy and shaky and close to passing out to make more than a few terse responses during the whole conversation, though he discovered that, like Chloe's resistance to Kyle's power, being mad enough gave him the reserves to withstand a great deal more than he usually could have.
Martha had had to repeat the probable consequences of murdering Lionel Luthor in cold blood several times to keep Jonathan's temper under control, especially once he realized what Lionel was doing to Clark. Clark contented himself with putting a touch of heat on the limousine's tires, so that they blew halfway down the road.
"So why here? And who's 'we'?"
Clark marveled at Lex's self-possession. Drugged and institutionalized and betrayed several times over, he was still focusing. No wonder he was already a businessman respected and feared in his own right. "Same answer to both. Remember Kyle Tippet, the super-salesman? Chloe found him working for this candidate. They went in and got you and brought you here."
"They?" Lex glared at him. "Not 'we'? What happened to Clark Kent, savior of Smallville?"
Uh-oh. Maybe Lex's sharp mind wasn't such a good thing after all. "I was there too," Clark said defensively. Way over-defensively, the politician could have told him. "I'm here now, aren't I? You're my friend. I couldn't leave you to that."
"Then why did you in the first place?" Lex snapped automatically, and then groaned as the pounding headache of conditioning against memory stabbed him.
Clark started at the question, then caught the blood pressure reaction. Feeling guilty at his profound relief at the distraction, he turned his attention to figuring out more or less what was going on. "Lex, try to calm down. You've got a whole pharmacy in your blood, and it's going to take time to wear off. Your scotch was drugged even before they locked you up. Kyle and his guy here are going to get a doctor to look at you, but fighting it won't help you any right now. Just relax."
"Easy for you to say," Lex muttered. The bits and pieces of what was left from a chemically-induced blackout sent bright slivers through the red-black explosions of throbbing pain in his head. "Clark ... you ... the car...."
Clark froze, his own panic spiraling out of control. "What car, Lex?" Keeping his voice calm and steady took as much effort as it had to swallow with Lana's damn meteor necklace around his throat. "All your cars are all right. I checked. I mean, Chloe checked. Back at the mansion."
"Never mind." Lex let out a sigh, employing long-accustomed biofeedback techniques to lessen the pressure in his blood vessels.
Whoever or whatever Clark was, he'd obviously never heard of subconscious mnemonic devices, or self-hypnotic regression, or shock-imprint memory. Though gods knew, as much as Lana babbled about her traumatic memory when she was barely old enough to remember her own name, he ought to have.
When he'd hit Clark with his Porsche, he'd been clinically dead for over a minute. You could be excused for certain memory lapses when you were dead. But the shock of meeting someone's eyes through your windshield when you ran into them was never going to be completely erased. The imprint flash of Clark's face in that second before impact had come back full force as soon as he saw the bridge again.
Some of Lex's younger days of debauchery had been spent in less than elegant bars, just to prove he could hold his own. The rough-hand older guys, once he had drawn his line in the sand and held it, put up with him, with a kind of amused tolerance, though they never let him buy a round. He'd decided that was their own line in the sand.
One night, a ground-pounder who had spent two years in-country got very drunk and told him about the meeting-someone's-eyes-when-you-killed-them business.
Lex continued to stop by that bar, but with an increasing sense of just how much he didn't belong there. Now he understood a little more of how that man had felt, except for one thing.
He hadn't killed Clark.
Lex had shot Nixon in the back and killed the piece of garbage, very deliberately. He wondered what the old river-rat would have made of that. Probably something like "it was either you or him, son." Or in that case, Nixon or Clark and his family. He felt as much remorse over Nixon as he did over having the mansion fumigated. There was no looking-them-in-the-eyes-business there.
He hadn't technically been looking Morgan Edge in the eyes, either. He'd been shooting at a target, a tormentor. He had been drugged past the edge of sanity. But he couldn't claim he didn't know what he was doing, because he damn well did. He was striking back. His mind had been raped. Helen had only tried to kill him. Edge and his own father had tried to make him helpless. Had tried to destroy everything he'd ever been or done or dreamed.
Shooting Edge was like shooting some irredeemably foul zombie or vampire. Sure, they were walking around with some semblance of life, but so what? No looking-them-in-the-eyes there, because you couldn't kill what already had no soul.
He could not remember if he'd met Clark's eyes when Clark interposed himself between Lex and Edge's out-of-control speeding car.
He did remember one split second of sheer terror, panic beyond anything a human body was meant to survive, the gallons of drugs that were short-circuiting his brain burning away in one supernova flash, as he saw Clark -- his friend, the one who had changed his life so drastically over the past two years, the only one who had ever accepted him for who he was and asked for nothing more, the only one who made him feel whole -- about to die.
Losing Clark would have been worse than anything his father had ever done to him. He consigned his own soul, whatever was left of it, to whatever power would at least spare Clark.
And then he remembered the bridge.
Lex had hit Clark with a car moving at highway speeds.
Edge had hit Clark with a car moving fast enough that Clark had barely had time to get Lex out of the way.
Clark was sitting next to him, bending over him, the only indication of a mark on him the frown furrowing his eyebrows. He met Clark's eyes.
Yes, he had seen his best friend turn away from an impact that should have left him a crushed bloody pulp, and for an endless split second, look him in the eyes.
And then vanish.
And sit here now and lie to him.
The old river-rat was right. You never forgot seeing the final fear in their eyes when you killed them.
He wondered if anyone else had ever, in all the long history of human conflicts, seen that final fear in the eyes of someone who was afraid of something that had nothing to do with dying.
"I'm tired," he heard himself saying. "Maybe I just need to sleep it off."
The relief in those changeable hazel eyes was a knife to his heart. Clark had gone to enormous lengths to free him, but still would not allow him past the shuttered surface of what he so desperately wanted to be windows to the soul.
Clark's eyes were no more human than mirrors. For all the expressiveness and warmth and worry, Lex might as well have been looking into a very well made robot optic. A beautiful android. A man who wasn't there.
"That's a good idea, Lex," the falsehood said gently. "I'll be right here."
Right here in body, nowhere at all in Lex's universe, in faith. Lex closed his eyes. He was aware of Clark's warmth, concern, care.
He was also aware of the gulf like the chasm between galaxies between them, the one Clark would never allow himself to cross and Lex would never dare demand, because Clark as a friend was infinitely preferable to Clark as an enemy, or worst of all, Clark absent from his life.
So long as Clark was here, he was willing to live with any lie. Because the worst hell ever invented by mankind was preferable to a Clark, a boy whose heights and depths of feeling matched his own, who did not care.
He retreated into his mental exercises, snarling occasionally as the drugs surged in his blood. He did not sleep.
* * * * *
Kyle, and the man who Clark was pretty sure by now would be their next president even if Kyle disappeared back into the woods, came back with boxes of donuts and coffee. There was much cheerful exchanging of status reports and scheduling and issues and gossip from the next room.
There was also a comment concerning the "really pretty boy and his poor friend," and when the staff would get to meet them properly, that made Clark's ears nearly set fire to his hair.
Lex peered up at him with amused eyes. It was hard to tell if he had been able to hear what was going on beyond the walls or not.
"So, have I been rescued from one asylum just to be put in another?"
Clark blinked at him. "A politician," Lex clarified impatiently. "They all want something. Money, usually, which of course a Luthor would be very good at providing. Though in a sane world, a dollar wouldn't buy a vote." Lex lapsed back into melancholy. "What's the ransom note? If it's over six figures, I'll have to go see the damn bank manager in person. Dad froze everything when I went crazy."
"You didn't go crazy," Clark said softly, fiercely. "You were drugged. There was something your dad didn't want you to remember."
"Like hitting you with a car?" When Clark's expression retreated to frozen panic, Lex waved a lax hand. "Never mind. I don't care. I'm going to Tibet to become a monk anyway. He can have the money. You can have the cars. Your politician can have the artwork. Sell it on e-bay or something." His eyes closed again.
"Considering what Lex Luthor has probably accumulated in artwork, that's a very generous donation," said the voice from the doorway, a voice that was by nature gentle and light, trained to a booming microphone presentation.
"Yeah, yeah." Lex didn't bother to look at him. "Public philanthropist, that's me. Get rid of that damn castle anyway. Sell the bricks. Just let me out of here."
The candidate tipped his head. "You're free to go at any time, Mr. Luthor. I'd advise that you get another day's sleep and some food in you that isn't drugged, and if you'll permit it, I'd like to have your blood checked for residuals of psychoactives, but since you're an adult, it would be against the law for me to so much as lock the door without having a psychiatrist examine you and declare you incompetent, and I doubt any independent counsel would permit that."
"Heh. I like your platform. Who are you really?" Lex opened his eyes and sat up abruptly. And very nearly collapsed again. "You really *are*. I thought Clark was just up to another of his weird games."
Clark caught him and helped him back onto a pillow. "It's the drugs, Lex. Things are going to seem strange to you for awhile until they wear off."
"Not as strange as you," Lex muttered, drifting back into the long-practiced mental disciplines. He left his eyes slightly slitted, watching for the expression on Clark's face. Sure enough, there was that half second of frozen fear, supplanted by a really bad "Moi?" look.
Kyle and the man he was working for exchanged a raised eyebrow. Kyle couldn't guess how much Lex knew, but he was certainly living up to his reputation as a Luthor. "Mr. Luthor, instead of taking your bad mood out on Clark, you might want to be thinking about just why someone, apparently your own father, would be drugging you. Even my old pal Rickman never did anything that low without a really good reason, and money wasn't exactly his strong suit. Lionel would have used him for toilet paper. You didn't get this kind of special treatment over a simple corporate merger."
"I found out something," Lex said tiredly. Dammit, why did Clark have to look like he was on the edge of a panic attack at every ambiguous statement? "I can't remember exactly what. They must have been doing some kind of conditioning on me while I was locked up. I get a hell of a headache trying to think about it."
The candidate paced, frowning. Lex decided he liked the man. No snap judgments, no phony shows of either imperious command or exaggerated concern. No photo-op face when he was thinking. "Father against son. Even George never pulled anything like this. In your family, either one hell of a lot of money involved, or felony criminal. Kyle mentioned Morgan Edge. Any possible connection?"
Lex started, then went white with a gasp. He clutched at his head in a futile attempt to block the pain. "Y-yes.... god, make it stop...."
Clark looked around helplessly. The candidate pointed. "Medical stuff's in the cabinet by the hall." He didn't mention that it was locked. Considering the condition of the phone, he was interested to see if the kid would notice.
Kyle put his hands on top of Lex's, pouring on the power once Clark was out of range. "Relax, relax," he chanted softly. "No one here will hurt you ... only think of things you want to ... safety, peace, calm...."
Lex let out a breath and opened his eyes experimentally. "Ah. Wow. I don't suppose we could bottle that. Can I buy your contract? You can have the artwork AND the cars. Well, leave one for Clark. He hates the Porsche anyway."
Clark had, in fact, not noticed that the medicine cabinet was locked, but even at near-sonic speed, he only made it two steps into the room before the level of power Kyle was putting out made him stumble and wish that the handful of painkillers he'd brought would work on him too. "K--Kyle...."
"Oops. Sorry. You okay, Lex?" At Lex's nod, Kyle closed his eyes and concentrated on drawing himself inward. He still wasn't quite sure what he was doing when it came to *not* trying to influence people. The sales pitch just came way too easily.
And neither the presidential candidate nor the young business magnate were unobservant enough to miss that peculiar little interchange. They met each other's eyes in the kind of intent speculation that poets would call "wild surmise."
Clark moved carefully around Kyle to hand Lex the various bottles of pills. Lex glared at them for a moment, then shrugged and dry-swallowed a couple. "Just in case. And I don't think Clark is smart enough to substitute a psychoactive for hydrocodone anyway."
Clark pouted. Lex snickered and leaned back again, eyes closed. "So. Morgan Edge." He paled again and swallowed, but went on steadily. "He and my father apparently ran together as children. No surprise that they both turned out to be vicious jackasses. Dad's just a little more discreet. So whatever they're trying to make me forget, it has something to do with a connection between them."
The candidate stopped pacing and divided a glare between Lex, Kyle, and Clark. "Edge had better hope that he stays dead. I'll make him a plank on my platform. I'll bet his empire has a hand in those crooked voting machines, too. Mm, that might explain the connection. Election rigging would be just Lionel's style."
Clark snorted. "Edge isn't that smart. His henchmen wouldn't know a computer voting machine from ... a...."
The dead silence in the room was Clark's first clue that he had basically lost his mind. "Um, from a playstation."
"Nice try, Clark," Lex said softly. "Pretty good for someone who's never even screwed a teacher for a grade, in fact. Excellent choice of misdirection. Very teenager. But the point is: how would you know anything about Edge or his thugs?"
The candidate blinked at Kyle, then raised an eyebrow at Lex. Drugged and hurt, Lex Luthor was still sharper than most of the other people in the running. Damn, he wanted both these kids on his team, money and special abilities be hanged, he wanted just their vote and confidence and first dibs on the potential they had to become..
"Um, well, Chloe did all the research. She found Lex, she found Kyle, she found out that Lionel and Edge had some kind of contact with each other. And I just thought that someone like Lionel wouldn't be dealing with a low-life gangster like Edge unless they both had something serious to hide."
"Which does not answer question number one, Clark. I will stipulate that Chloe told you who Edge was, though I don't believe that for a second myself, because you would have said so up front if she had. But about his people's computer skills? Did Chloe run a background check on everyone in Edge's crime gang? If so, the Metropolis police want to hire her as of yesterday."
"Clark." The candidate saw Kyle's eyes sharpen and sparkle green, the way they did when his talent starting playing him instead of the other way around, the way that made him such a hit at public appearances.
Obviously it wasn't making him a hit with the tall kid, who had backed against the wall and looked like he was going to faint or recall his donut any second.
Kyle cursed and stomped over to the opposite wall. "Clark, you are talking to the future president of the United States. He's going to have to know about you sooner or later. From where I stand, sooner might be easier on the whole acceptance and access thing."
Clark slumped. "I know about Edge because I went crazy and ran away from home and did some things for him last summer, okay? I was -- I was -- let's just say that I know what it's like to be drugged out of my mind just as much as you do, Lex. And when I wouldn't work for him any more, he came after me. And my family. I was glad when he died. I wanted to -- I nearly -- I thought I'd put it behind me. I hope I never do anything like that again. I hope I never even THINK of anything like that again. But sometimes it sneaks up on me and I do think about it. I'm sorry. But I did it, and I can't change that. Satisfied?"
The other three were silent. Obviously Clark wasn't telling the whole story. But in the face of the barely-suppressed tears showing wet in his lashes with his face turned away, none of them were going to call him on it right now.
Kyle shook his head in admiration and wished that he could put an arm around Clark's shoulders in sympathy. The kid wasn't really a bad liar. The problem was that he hated being dishonest, but was way too long and unhappily experienced at it. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, he was lying -- no, not lying, but pretending. Even in his sleep, he had to pretend.
Clark could have done a lot worse than just flatten a chair and crush a phone in a moment of exasperation. As hard as Kyle's own power was to control, it was nothing compared to Clark's, and Clark had his strength under strict discipline right down to the way he walked and the way he touched this world that was so terribly fragile to him. Clark was almost under control even in his nightmares.
The big man did put his arm around Clark's shoulders, pulling him close in a hug that had nothing to do with politics. "The only thing that counts is that we learn from our mistakes, son," he said gently. "Find me anyone on this planet who hasn't screwed up, and I'll drop out of the race and become a disciple and follow them around like a dog."
Clark muffled a laugh. "I'd say that would be kind of undignified, but, well, I'm not one to talk. About any of it. I mean, there's, even Lex's cats follow him around sometimes, and you call them undignified at your peril." Even though the cats couldn't break his skin, they had reduced his clothing to something Chloe would have posted front and center on both the wall of weird and the school paper. More than once.
"The cats!" Lex brightened. "Have they destroyed that damn castle yet?"
"No, the cooks are keeping them happy. Your desk is pretty much a goner, though. At least they're keeping Lionel out." Lionel's skin wasn't claw-proof. Martha's fond references to the "sweet little kitties" was enough to make Lionel curse in public.
Kyle and his candidate exchanged confused glances. It escaped no one's attention that Clark and Kyle were still keeping their distance from each other. But cats?
Clark separated himself from the big man's warmth reluctantly. "Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera. They're kind of Lex's front-line security force. When he's okay to go home again, I don't think anyone will get past them again. They check all of his food, but they don't usually pay much attention to the booze. They will now, I bet."
Lex snorted. "Checking" his food consisted of them eating half of it. The first half. "Checking" his expensive liquors would probably consist of them knocking it all on the floor and using the broken pieces as batting toys.
"You named your cats after the Furies?" The big man wasn't sure whether to laugh or tell the doctor to hurry up and come take a blood sample before Lex started frothing. "What are they, saber-tooths?"
"Nah. Tabbies and a long-hair. Strays. I would have named them after demons from hell, but that would have been tempting fate. It's all Clark's fault anyway." Lex tried to glare. "They keep trying to get even with him."
Kyle chuckled. He could just imagine what a cat would be trying to "get even" with an invulnerable super-fast alien over.
He wondered if Lex did. Lex could be a really good ally. Or a really bad problem. He didn't want Clark to be even in the same city if he ended up having to use his glowing handshake to make sure that Lex wouldn't be a problem.
The candidate just laughed. "Can I borrow them for my security force? I'll introduce a bill giving cats the right to vote."
Lex made a dismissive noise and decided that he was getting in the mood for a nap. "Sure, if they want. But they're already registered to vote. They're Luthors, after all."
Clark and Kyle and the candidate looked at each other. The big man lost it first.
It was too bad VP was already spoken for.
* * * * * "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free". - Bill Moyers
* * * * * author's note: I absolutely could not think of a single way to extend or end this without invoking The Cats. And no, you do not want to know what other ideas LaCasta has come up with for the Furies, until she tells you herself. Very Evil Grin
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." - Benjamin Franklin
* * * * *
Lex opened his eyes blearily, terror and confusion and exhaustion warring for the upper hand to the point that he wondered whether he even cared which one won. Before he could scream or strike out or pass out again, a big warm hand touched his, and a familiar voice, a familiar face and scent, slipped into his senses.
"Hey, Lex." Clark's voice was quiet, the smile gentle, the eyebrows turned up in the middle in the familiar apologetic, disarming look. "How're you feeling?"
"Clark?" Lex blinked once, twice, and bit down on his lip. Ah, blood. If this was a hallucination, it was the best one he'd managed yet. "What are you doing here?" He licked his blood, considering the taste as if it were wine, comparing it to memory. His eyes narrowed. "What am I doing here?" Yep, tasted like his own blood, but then, what else would it taste like if this was a hallucination? And besides that and Clark, absolutely nothing was familiar. "Where is here?"
Clark actually had the nerve to chuckle. "You're not going to believe this. You're in the back room of the headquarters for one of the men running for the presidency."
Lex closed his eyes. He breathed in, deeply, held it while he thought, let it out. "Okay, this is clearly reality. No hallucination of even my father at his worst would make up something like that. The Clark I know wouldn't even be able to read that line with a straight face." He peered up suspiciously at the younger man. "Are you the Clark I know?"
Clark hesitated at that. The question was loaded like a string of cheap landmines sitting in a puddle of nitroglycerine. "I'm the same Clark you've always known," he countered finally, and even to him it sounded lame.
Lex sighed tiredly and closed his eyes again. "Yeah, you are. Never a straight answer." Another stab of unreasoning fear roiled through him, competing with exasperation and anger this time. Clark would sit there and cheerfully tell him that he was sleeping in a presidential candidate's bed, but he wouldn't just say, of course I'm Clark, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Well, in the immortal words of Harlan Ellison, f*** that s#**. "So how did I get here?"
Clark came back on track, having a question he could answer without evasion. "We found out your dad was drugging you and had you locked up, and we basically busted you out. I couldn't take you back to the farm or the mansion, Lionel or Edge's people would both come looking for you there within a day. This seemed like a safer place to hide out for awhile."
Lionel already had come looking. Jonathan had faced him down with the shotgun not exactly pointed, but not exactly at parade rest, either. It wasn't too suspicious for the son to stand behind instead of beside his armed father, close enough for support but not the one in direct confrontation.
But he doubted that Lionel was fooled. The wily old mad had all but lined his jacket with chips of refined green crystal. Clark had been too dizzy and shaky and close to passing out to make more than a few terse responses during the whole conversation, though he discovered that, like Chloe's resistance to Kyle's power, being mad enough gave him the reserves to withstand a great deal more than he usually could have.
Martha had had to repeat the probable consequences of murdering Lionel Luthor in cold blood several times to keep Jonathan's temper under control, especially once he realized what Lionel was doing to Clark. Clark contented himself with putting a touch of heat on the limousine's tires, so that they blew halfway down the road.
"So why here? And who's 'we'?"
Clark marveled at Lex's self-possession. Drugged and institutionalized and betrayed several times over, he was still focusing. No wonder he was already a businessman respected and feared in his own right. "Same answer to both. Remember Kyle Tippet, the super-salesman? Chloe found him working for this candidate. They went in and got you and brought you here."
"They?" Lex glared at him. "Not 'we'? What happened to Clark Kent, savior of Smallville?"
Uh-oh. Maybe Lex's sharp mind wasn't such a good thing after all. "I was there too," Clark said defensively. Way over-defensively, the politician could have told him. "I'm here now, aren't I? You're my friend. I couldn't leave you to that."
"Then why did you in the first place?" Lex snapped automatically, and then groaned as the pounding headache of conditioning against memory stabbed him.
Clark started at the question, then caught the blood pressure reaction. Feeling guilty at his profound relief at the distraction, he turned his attention to figuring out more or less what was going on. "Lex, try to calm down. You've got a whole pharmacy in your blood, and it's going to take time to wear off. Your scotch was drugged even before they locked you up. Kyle and his guy here are going to get a doctor to look at you, but fighting it won't help you any right now. Just relax."
"Easy for you to say," Lex muttered. The bits and pieces of what was left from a chemically-induced blackout sent bright slivers through the red-black explosions of throbbing pain in his head. "Clark ... you ... the car...."
Clark froze, his own panic spiraling out of control. "What car, Lex?" Keeping his voice calm and steady took as much effort as it had to swallow with Lana's damn meteor necklace around his throat. "All your cars are all right. I checked. I mean, Chloe checked. Back at the mansion."
"Never mind." Lex let out a sigh, employing long-accustomed biofeedback techniques to lessen the pressure in his blood vessels.
Whoever or whatever Clark was, he'd obviously never heard of subconscious mnemonic devices, or self-hypnotic regression, or shock-imprint memory. Though gods knew, as much as Lana babbled about her traumatic memory when she was barely old enough to remember her own name, he ought to have.
When he'd hit Clark with his Porsche, he'd been clinically dead for over a minute. You could be excused for certain memory lapses when you were dead. But the shock of meeting someone's eyes through your windshield when you ran into them was never going to be completely erased. The imprint flash of Clark's face in that second before impact had come back full force as soon as he saw the bridge again.
Some of Lex's younger days of debauchery had been spent in less than elegant bars, just to prove he could hold his own. The rough-hand older guys, once he had drawn his line in the sand and held it, put up with him, with a kind of amused tolerance, though they never let him buy a round. He'd decided that was their own line in the sand.
One night, a ground-pounder who had spent two years in-country got very drunk and told him about the meeting-someone's-eyes-when-you-killed-them business.
Lex continued to stop by that bar, but with an increasing sense of just how much he didn't belong there. Now he understood a little more of how that man had felt, except for one thing.
He hadn't killed Clark.
Lex had shot Nixon in the back and killed the piece of garbage, very deliberately. He wondered what the old river-rat would have made of that. Probably something like "it was either you or him, son." Or in that case, Nixon or Clark and his family. He felt as much remorse over Nixon as he did over having the mansion fumigated. There was no looking-them-in-the-eyes-business there.
He hadn't technically been looking Morgan Edge in the eyes, either. He'd been shooting at a target, a tormentor. He had been drugged past the edge of sanity. But he couldn't claim he didn't know what he was doing, because he damn well did. He was striking back. His mind had been raped. Helen had only tried to kill him. Edge and his own father had tried to make him helpless. Had tried to destroy everything he'd ever been or done or dreamed.
Shooting Edge was like shooting some irredeemably foul zombie or vampire. Sure, they were walking around with some semblance of life, but so what? No looking-them-in-the-eyes there, because you couldn't kill what already had no soul.
He could not remember if he'd met Clark's eyes when Clark interposed himself between Lex and Edge's out-of-control speeding car.
He did remember one split second of sheer terror, panic beyond anything a human body was meant to survive, the gallons of drugs that were short-circuiting his brain burning away in one supernova flash, as he saw Clark -- his friend, the one who had changed his life so drastically over the past two years, the only one who had ever accepted him for who he was and asked for nothing more, the only one who made him feel whole -- about to die.
Losing Clark would have been worse than anything his father had ever done to him. He consigned his own soul, whatever was left of it, to whatever power would at least spare Clark.
And then he remembered the bridge.
Lex had hit Clark with a car moving at highway speeds.
Edge had hit Clark with a car moving fast enough that Clark had barely had time to get Lex out of the way.
Clark was sitting next to him, bending over him, the only indication of a mark on him the frown furrowing his eyebrows. He met Clark's eyes.
Yes, he had seen his best friend turn away from an impact that should have left him a crushed bloody pulp, and for an endless split second, look him in the eyes.
And then vanish.
And sit here now and lie to him.
The old river-rat was right. You never forgot seeing the final fear in their eyes when you killed them.
He wondered if anyone else had ever, in all the long history of human conflicts, seen that final fear in the eyes of someone who was afraid of something that had nothing to do with dying.
"I'm tired," he heard himself saying. "Maybe I just need to sleep it off."
The relief in those changeable hazel eyes was a knife to his heart. Clark had gone to enormous lengths to free him, but still would not allow him past the shuttered surface of what he so desperately wanted to be windows to the soul.
Clark's eyes were no more human than mirrors. For all the expressiveness and warmth and worry, Lex might as well have been looking into a very well made robot optic. A beautiful android. A man who wasn't there.
"That's a good idea, Lex," the falsehood said gently. "I'll be right here."
Right here in body, nowhere at all in Lex's universe, in faith. Lex closed his eyes. He was aware of Clark's warmth, concern, care.
He was also aware of the gulf like the chasm between galaxies between them, the one Clark would never allow himself to cross and Lex would never dare demand, because Clark as a friend was infinitely preferable to Clark as an enemy, or worst of all, Clark absent from his life.
So long as Clark was here, he was willing to live with any lie. Because the worst hell ever invented by mankind was preferable to a Clark, a boy whose heights and depths of feeling matched his own, who did not care.
He retreated into his mental exercises, snarling occasionally as the drugs surged in his blood. He did not sleep.
* * * * *
Kyle, and the man who Clark was pretty sure by now would be their next president even if Kyle disappeared back into the woods, came back with boxes of donuts and coffee. There was much cheerful exchanging of status reports and scheduling and issues and gossip from the next room.
There was also a comment concerning the "really pretty boy and his poor friend," and when the staff would get to meet them properly, that made Clark's ears nearly set fire to his hair.
Lex peered up at him with amused eyes. It was hard to tell if he had been able to hear what was going on beyond the walls or not.
"So, have I been rescued from one asylum just to be put in another?"
Clark blinked at him. "A politician," Lex clarified impatiently. "They all want something. Money, usually, which of course a Luthor would be very good at providing. Though in a sane world, a dollar wouldn't buy a vote." Lex lapsed back into melancholy. "What's the ransom note? If it's over six figures, I'll have to go see the damn bank manager in person. Dad froze everything when I went crazy."
"You didn't go crazy," Clark said softly, fiercely. "You were drugged. There was something your dad didn't want you to remember."
"Like hitting you with a car?" When Clark's expression retreated to frozen panic, Lex waved a lax hand. "Never mind. I don't care. I'm going to Tibet to become a monk anyway. He can have the money. You can have the cars. Your politician can have the artwork. Sell it on e-bay or something." His eyes closed again.
"Considering what Lex Luthor has probably accumulated in artwork, that's a very generous donation," said the voice from the doorway, a voice that was by nature gentle and light, trained to a booming microphone presentation.
"Yeah, yeah." Lex didn't bother to look at him. "Public philanthropist, that's me. Get rid of that damn castle anyway. Sell the bricks. Just let me out of here."
The candidate tipped his head. "You're free to go at any time, Mr. Luthor. I'd advise that you get another day's sleep and some food in you that isn't drugged, and if you'll permit it, I'd like to have your blood checked for residuals of psychoactives, but since you're an adult, it would be against the law for me to so much as lock the door without having a psychiatrist examine you and declare you incompetent, and I doubt any independent counsel would permit that."
"Heh. I like your platform. Who are you really?" Lex opened his eyes and sat up abruptly. And very nearly collapsed again. "You really *are*. I thought Clark was just up to another of his weird games."
Clark caught him and helped him back onto a pillow. "It's the drugs, Lex. Things are going to seem strange to you for awhile until they wear off."
"Not as strange as you," Lex muttered, drifting back into the long-practiced mental disciplines. He left his eyes slightly slitted, watching for the expression on Clark's face. Sure enough, there was that half second of frozen fear, supplanted by a really bad "Moi?" look.
Kyle and the man he was working for exchanged a raised eyebrow. Kyle couldn't guess how much Lex knew, but he was certainly living up to his reputation as a Luthor. "Mr. Luthor, instead of taking your bad mood out on Clark, you might want to be thinking about just why someone, apparently your own father, would be drugging you. Even my old pal Rickman never did anything that low without a really good reason, and money wasn't exactly his strong suit. Lionel would have used him for toilet paper. You didn't get this kind of special treatment over a simple corporate merger."
"I found out something," Lex said tiredly. Dammit, why did Clark have to look like he was on the edge of a panic attack at every ambiguous statement? "I can't remember exactly what. They must have been doing some kind of conditioning on me while I was locked up. I get a hell of a headache trying to think about it."
The candidate paced, frowning. Lex decided he liked the man. No snap judgments, no phony shows of either imperious command or exaggerated concern. No photo-op face when he was thinking. "Father against son. Even George never pulled anything like this. In your family, either one hell of a lot of money involved, or felony criminal. Kyle mentioned Morgan Edge. Any possible connection?"
Lex started, then went white with a gasp. He clutched at his head in a futile attempt to block the pain. "Y-yes.... god, make it stop...."
Clark looked around helplessly. The candidate pointed. "Medical stuff's in the cabinet by the hall." He didn't mention that it was locked. Considering the condition of the phone, he was interested to see if the kid would notice.
Kyle put his hands on top of Lex's, pouring on the power once Clark was out of range. "Relax, relax," he chanted softly. "No one here will hurt you ... only think of things you want to ... safety, peace, calm...."
Lex let out a breath and opened his eyes experimentally. "Ah. Wow. I don't suppose we could bottle that. Can I buy your contract? You can have the artwork AND the cars. Well, leave one for Clark. He hates the Porsche anyway."
Clark had, in fact, not noticed that the medicine cabinet was locked, but even at near-sonic speed, he only made it two steps into the room before the level of power Kyle was putting out made him stumble and wish that the handful of painkillers he'd brought would work on him too. "K--Kyle...."
"Oops. Sorry. You okay, Lex?" At Lex's nod, Kyle closed his eyes and concentrated on drawing himself inward. He still wasn't quite sure what he was doing when it came to *not* trying to influence people. The sales pitch just came way too easily.
And neither the presidential candidate nor the young business magnate were unobservant enough to miss that peculiar little interchange. They met each other's eyes in the kind of intent speculation that poets would call "wild surmise."
Clark moved carefully around Kyle to hand Lex the various bottles of pills. Lex glared at them for a moment, then shrugged and dry-swallowed a couple. "Just in case. And I don't think Clark is smart enough to substitute a psychoactive for hydrocodone anyway."
Clark pouted. Lex snickered and leaned back again, eyes closed. "So. Morgan Edge." He paled again and swallowed, but went on steadily. "He and my father apparently ran together as children. No surprise that they both turned out to be vicious jackasses. Dad's just a little more discreet. So whatever they're trying to make me forget, it has something to do with a connection between them."
The candidate stopped pacing and divided a glare between Lex, Kyle, and Clark. "Edge had better hope that he stays dead. I'll make him a plank on my platform. I'll bet his empire has a hand in those crooked voting machines, too. Mm, that might explain the connection. Election rigging would be just Lionel's style."
Clark snorted. "Edge isn't that smart. His henchmen wouldn't know a computer voting machine from ... a...."
The dead silence in the room was Clark's first clue that he had basically lost his mind. "Um, from a playstation."
"Nice try, Clark," Lex said softly. "Pretty good for someone who's never even screwed a teacher for a grade, in fact. Excellent choice of misdirection. Very teenager. But the point is: how would you know anything about Edge or his thugs?"
The candidate blinked at Kyle, then raised an eyebrow at Lex. Drugged and hurt, Lex Luthor was still sharper than most of the other people in the running. Damn, he wanted both these kids on his team, money and special abilities be hanged, he wanted just their vote and confidence and first dibs on the potential they had to become..
"Um, well, Chloe did all the research. She found Lex, she found Kyle, she found out that Lionel and Edge had some kind of contact with each other. And I just thought that someone like Lionel wouldn't be dealing with a low-life gangster like Edge unless they both had something serious to hide."
"Which does not answer question number one, Clark. I will stipulate that Chloe told you who Edge was, though I don't believe that for a second myself, because you would have said so up front if she had. But about his people's computer skills? Did Chloe run a background check on everyone in Edge's crime gang? If so, the Metropolis police want to hire her as of yesterday."
"Clark." The candidate saw Kyle's eyes sharpen and sparkle green, the way they did when his talent starting playing him instead of the other way around, the way that made him such a hit at public appearances.
Obviously it wasn't making him a hit with the tall kid, who had backed against the wall and looked like he was going to faint or recall his donut any second.
Kyle cursed and stomped over to the opposite wall. "Clark, you are talking to the future president of the United States. He's going to have to know about you sooner or later. From where I stand, sooner might be easier on the whole acceptance and access thing."
Clark slumped. "I know about Edge because I went crazy and ran away from home and did some things for him last summer, okay? I was -- I was -- let's just say that I know what it's like to be drugged out of my mind just as much as you do, Lex. And when I wouldn't work for him any more, he came after me. And my family. I was glad when he died. I wanted to -- I nearly -- I thought I'd put it behind me. I hope I never do anything like that again. I hope I never even THINK of anything like that again. But sometimes it sneaks up on me and I do think about it. I'm sorry. But I did it, and I can't change that. Satisfied?"
The other three were silent. Obviously Clark wasn't telling the whole story. But in the face of the barely-suppressed tears showing wet in his lashes with his face turned away, none of them were going to call him on it right now.
Kyle shook his head in admiration and wished that he could put an arm around Clark's shoulders in sympathy. The kid wasn't really a bad liar. The problem was that he hated being dishonest, but was way too long and unhappily experienced at it. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day, he was lying -- no, not lying, but pretending. Even in his sleep, he had to pretend.
Clark could have done a lot worse than just flatten a chair and crush a phone in a moment of exasperation. As hard as Kyle's own power was to control, it was nothing compared to Clark's, and Clark had his strength under strict discipline right down to the way he walked and the way he touched this world that was so terribly fragile to him. Clark was almost under control even in his nightmares.
The big man did put his arm around Clark's shoulders, pulling him close in a hug that had nothing to do with politics. "The only thing that counts is that we learn from our mistakes, son," he said gently. "Find me anyone on this planet who hasn't screwed up, and I'll drop out of the race and become a disciple and follow them around like a dog."
Clark muffled a laugh. "I'd say that would be kind of undignified, but, well, I'm not one to talk. About any of it. I mean, there's, even Lex's cats follow him around sometimes, and you call them undignified at your peril." Even though the cats couldn't break his skin, they had reduced his clothing to something Chloe would have posted front and center on both the wall of weird and the school paper. More than once.
"The cats!" Lex brightened. "Have they destroyed that damn castle yet?"
"No, the cooks are keeping them happy. Your desk is pretty much a goner, though. At least they're keeping Lionel out." Lionel's skin wasn't claw-proof. Martha's fond references to the "sweet little kitties" was enough to make Lionel curse in public.
Kyle and his candidate exchanged confused glances. It escaped no one's attention that Clark and Kyle were still keeping their distance from each other. But cats?
Clark separated himself from the big man's warmth reluctantly. "Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera. They're kind of Lex's front-line security force. When he's okay to go home again, I don't think anyone will get past them again. They check all of his food, but they don't usually pay much attention to the booze. They will now, I bet."
Lex snorted. "Checking" his food consisted of them eating half of it. The first half. "Checking" his expensive liquors would probably consist of them knocking it all on the floor and using the broken pieces as batting toys.
"You named your cats after the Furies?" The big man wasn't sure whether to laugh or tell the doctor to hurry up and come take a blood sample before Lex started frothing. "What are they, saber-tooths?"
"Nah. Tabbies and a long-hair. Strays. I would have named them after demons from hell, but that would have been tempting fate. It's all Clark's fault anyway." Lex tried to glare. "They keep trying to get even with him."
Kyle chuckled. He could just imagine what a cat would be trying to "get even" with an invulnerable super-fast alien over.
He wondered if Lex did. Lex could be a really good ally. Or a really bad problem. He didn't want Clark to be even in the same city if he ended up having to use his glowing handshake to make sure that Lex wouldn't be a problem.
The candidate just laughed. "Can I borrow them for my security force? I'll introduce a bill giving cats the right to vote."
Lex made a dismissive noise and decided that he was getting in the mood for a nap. "Sure, if they want. But they're already registered to vote. They're Luthors, after all."
Clark and Kyle and the candidate looked at each other. The big man lost it first.
It was too bad VP was already spoken for.
* * * * * "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free". - Bill Moyers
* * * * * author's note: I absolutely could not think of a single way to extend or end this without invoking The Cats. And no, you do not want to know what other ideas LaCasta has come up with for the Furies, until she tells you herself. Very Evil Grin