Thanks to all of you who sent reviews. You guys are great!
Christmas
By
Tayoni
~*~ Part Twelve ~*~
Even though he was annoyed with Steve, he didn't hate the guy. Steve decided to head out, and left him with a message for Clark that he'd gone on ahead to Smallville to spend the weekend with them at the farm. He went indoors, found Clark still sleeping where he'd left him, now tucked under a quilt, but Grampa had gone.
Too hesitant to wake him or to sit down and also fall asleep, he headed for the kitchen, hoping for a drink. There, he found Grampa sitting at the table drinking beer and reading the paper.
"Grandpa." Lex greeted.
"Help yerself to a beer. In the fridge."
"I gotta drive."
"Coffee then." Grampa said motioning to the coffee pot on the stove. "It's fresh. Cups are in the cupboard left of the fridge."
Lex opened a cupboard, found a mug, and poured himself coffee, then stirred in cream and sugar. He sat down at the table with Grampa.
"Yer moving around like yer still stuffed."
Lex chuckled. "Couldn't help myself. The rumors about you are more than true, Grampa. You can outcook anyone I've ever met before. Now I know where your daughter got it from."
He laughed at him. "Hope you didn't get offended by anything Meagan said."
Lex could have lied and said no, but that would have been to obviously a lie. "I was a little, but I'm not mad about it. Think what she said about Clark was pretty nasty though."
"Yer truthfull." He said turned his coffee cup around. "She is a nasty woman. Can't handle life no more, and she turned bitter and mean as hell."
"I think I've seen Meagan at some of my father's parties."
Grampa met his eyes. "That wouldn't surprise me. She had a fixation for your family. Her mother tried to get her to marry your father. Lionel wouldn't have her though, he already had his mind set on Lillian."
"Small world." Lex whispered and didn't mention that he knew his father had probably slept with Meagan.
"That it is."
"Can you tell me about him? My grampa?" Lex wondered.
Grampa breathed heavily. "I don't want to give you a false heroic image of him. I don't want you to think he was all bad either though."
"Please do tell." Lex said.
"This is going to sound pretty surprising." Grampa started. "We were in school together, but we didn't know each other well enough to know one another's names, and we were six grades apart. One summer, I was working at a concession stand selling soda and cotton candy at the waterfront. Took a break, went for a walk, saw him walking along ahead of me, then a truck came out of nowhere. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. I knew he didn't see the truck coming. So I took a flying leap and shoved him out of the way."
Lex's jaw fell. "You...saved his life?"
"Yeah. I saved his life." He grinned.
"What a parrallel." Lex said.
"After that we were friends. He was rich at that time. Not like you are now, but he had money. He bought me dinner, and a new shirt to replace the one I had that got torn off me somehow in the confusion. After that, he came all the way to that side of the city after work to pick me up and drive me home every day that summer."
Lex grinned. "You became friends?"
"Good friends." He said. "He looked at me like a little brother, and took care of me, looked after me."
"What was so bad about him though?"
"It's hard to pinpoint." He said. "As far as I ever knew, he was a good man. If he had any dark secrets, he never let me see them. I didn't care to know either. But there were times, I felt like I'd saved the life of a demon, instead of a human being, and now I had one of hell's angels guarding me from evil."
"That's quite a way to put it." Lex said feeling himself going pale.
"It's the only way to put it." He said. "There's things I learned about him, that I never let him know I knew about. Things that will go to the grave with me. Len was a good man when he was young, but he did some things that made me want to keep my distance from him. I'd see the way he'd treat others, and later on, I saw how he treated his wife, and his son. I didn't like it much."
Lex swallowed coffee, listened.
"I guess in a way I was a little like Clark. I accepted lies, went along with them, and then the lies got bigger and bigger. I always thought if I hadn't let Len get away with that first lie he'd told me, things might have been different if not between us, then maybe for him. If I caught him in a lie and he knew it, he'd look guilty for weeks."
"What did he lie to you about?"
"Little things at first." He said. "Things that weren't quite lies, and I can't remember anything specific. I know he was getting into some dirty dealings because he wanted to make money quick. I'd ask him a question in such a way that should have been answered yes or no. Instead, he'd ask me what I thought. I thought what I wanted to think. That he couldn't do anything wrong, and would never do something illegal. He didn't see me for what I was at the time, or maybe he did, but he mistook me for a man his age instead of a kid. I accepted from him what he wanted to tell me without questions even when I knew he was lying. I had my secrets though, and he was greedy to know everything about me. There are things I wasn't ready to tell anyone about though."
"I hate secrets." Lex said.
"People have them, Lex." He said.
Lex met his eyes. "What if the secret is half out in the open already, and you just want your friend to admit to the truth?"
Grampa grinned. "Ahhh...now I see how much you're like your grandfather, Lex. There's something you haven't learned about life, and about friendship. Everyone has secrets. You keep yours, but you don't like when others keep theirs."
Lex scowled.
"Part of being a good friend is accepting the fact that your friend won't tell you everything about himself."
Lex glared at nothing.
"Clark's keeping something from you, and I know it pisses you off that he won't tell you."
"It's not what he's keeping from me." Lex said. "I'd tell him anything he wanted to know, but he won't give me the truth. I try to get him to tell me, but he lies to me."
"Certain truths are sometimes best left buried." He told him.
"This truth is half-way out of the earth." Lex said.
"What truth might that be?"
Lex said nothing.
"Lex." He said. "You have a few skeletons in your closet. I don't mean dark secrets that might shock someone. I mean embarrasing little details that you wouldn't want your mother or your best friend to find out about. You got something like that?"
Lex thought about that, and then nodded. "If Clark asked me outright, I wouldn't lie to him. Even embarrassing as a secret might be, I wouldn't lie to him if he questioned me about it."
"You'd mis-direct him though."
Lex felt guilty. He had done that.
"I kept a secret from Len and I know it ate him alive inside." He said. "Killed our friendship eventually because I wouldn't tell him what it was."
"If you knew holding that information away from him was hurting him, then why didn't you tell him?"
"Think about how old I was, Lex." He said. "Fourteen or so. Sensitive age, you know that. Everything starts changing. Little things get embarrassing for no reason at all. I was working on getting over that phase of my life, while Len wanted to know so badly what I was keeping from him."
"Are you saying you wouldn't tell him because you were embarrassed?"
"Exactly." He said. "I wanted him to know. But at that young an age it was to humiliating for me to talk about. Eighteen was a little better. Twenty, I was getting over it. Twenty-three I was finally able to discuss it with my closest friends, but by that time, Len had gone out of my life as a friend. We were just business associates after that."
Lex blinked. "You're saying, you didn't tell him because you were embarrassed by it?"
"I just said that."
Lex made a face.
"What's the matter?"
"You know what Clark's keeping from me, Grampa?"
"Yes, I do."
"Honestly, Grampa. I don't really care what he's keeping from me. But I don't like being lied to."
"Don't ask questions when you know you'll be given a lie for an answer."
"Why does he lie to me?"
"Why does anyone lie about anything, Lex?" he wondered.
"Fear of telling the truth."
"He's a boy, Lex." He said. "You get to be my age, and sixteen sounds no different than twelve or three. He's a baby. Give him time to grow up."
"At twenty-two, what am I?"
"A young man, not much more than a boy who grew up way to fast. Far as certain things go, you know as much as I do. In other ways, you're as naive as Clark, maybe more so. One thing I notice about you is that you don't know how to accept people at the face value they offer."
"Why should I when there's so much more underneath?"
"That kind of thinking will get you into trouble. You push too hard and you'll lose every friend you ever try to make before you get close enough to them to learn the meaning behind it."
"I know the meaning..."
"You don't. If you did, you wouldn't pester at Clark to tell you things he's not ready to tell."
Lex felt himself getting angry.
"That too, Lex." He said gently. "That temper of yours. Quiet kind of temper, but it rages out of control inside of you. Yer gramp was the same way, and his temper drove him over the edge and scared me away from him. He got mad at me because I wouldn't tell him a stupid little secret. It's what I called his demonic mood. He scared the hell out of me so bad, I litteraly ran away. I never went near him again."
"You got scared because he threw a fit because you wouldn't tell your secret?"
"Exactly."
"What are you getting at, Grampa?" Lex asked.
"I'm getting at the reason why I wouldn't tell Len my secret."
"Do tell."
"I was scared of what he'd think of me." He said. "Afraid things would change between us. That he'd stop being my friend, or that he'd look at me differently."
Lex waited.
Grampa said nothing.
"Would you have told him eventually?"
"Course not. He made me feel like it was my duty to give him all of my secrets."
"I don't understand." Lex said.
"People don't give in because someone forces them to give in, Lex. They give in because they want to." He said. "Forcing a secret out of someone is sort of like raping a virgin. Force her, and she'll run and hide and you'll never see her again. Wait patiently, for her to give in, and you will get it eventually, and then she'll return and you'll get more. You want Clark's secret, you just sit back, be patient, and don't make him think you have to know. He trusts you enough so I know he'll let you have it one of these days. Might take him years. Maybe you'll know in a week. I don't know. But I know if you can let him be a child for a while longer, wait until he grows up some more, then you'll know. You'll know, and I think the two of you will still be sitting back swapping bullshit when your in yer eighties."
"You're saying that you know for a fact Clark trusts me enough to let me know his secret? His most profound secret in the world?"
"He wouldn't have brought you here, if he didn't trust you, Lex."
Lex leaned back in his chair, and grinned. "I wished he'd have told me the reason he didn't tell me wasn't because he didn't trust me."
"Now, he's too young to understand things like that, and you should know it." Grampa scolded.
Lex gave the man a wide eyed look.
"That right their is exactly what drove a jagged knife between your grampa and myself." He said.
"What was so horrible that you thought you couldn't tell him?"
"I got kicked by a mule once upon a time. Think I was about nine or so." He said. "Had to have one of my testies amputated for it."
"Ow..." Lex breathed, blinked, then scowled. "That's a secret?"
He nodded. "It is when you're a sensitive kid. I thought all that time he'd think I was less than a man, or maybe he'd be afraid my bad karma would infect him and he'd think he'd lose one too."
"That's silly." Lex said.
"I was a kid. Kids think silly things." He said.
"Clark's secret is a lot bigger than yours."
"Is it really? Or is it just something a little to the left and up two notches?" He grinned at him. "Lex, it doesn't matter what it is. He thinks if you learned his secret you'll think differently of him, and maybe even be afraid of him."
"Why would I be afraid of him, if I knew his secret?"
"You probably wouldn't be, Lex. The point is, he thinks you will be afraid. He's a sensitive child."
"He's not a child."
"Not a man either." He said.
"Can't argue that point." Lex said.
Grampa got up to get another beer.
Now that he was out of the way, Lex could see beyond him, out the kitchen door into the hall. There was a picture of Clark he hadn't seen before. It was of him at six or maybe seven, grinning softly, eyes bright and happy and clear blue and wide open. Childishness shone through in that image, and he realized that even though Clark's face had changed and attained the look of a strong young man, his skin wasn't so rosey, and his cheeks weren't so round, but his eyes were still just as innocent now as they were in that picture.
He looked away from the picture, thinking of pictures of himself. The innocence that was visible in Clark's eyes at seven and at sixteen were the same. Lex had lost that kind of innocense so long ago that he couldn't even remember a time when he'd been naive at all. At three he'd been more conscious and aware of life and the world than Clark was now. The day he'd ceased to be a virgin had been a monumental eye opening experience for him. The last event which seemed to trigger adulthood, and had made him realize how little he really knew about the world in general.
Clark barely knew anything at all about the world.
Clark was still a virgin.
"What's the matter, Lex?"
He looked at Grampa, then smiled crookedly. "Think I just got hit upside the head by reality."
Grampa looked down the hall, and then at him and smiled. "You better go on wake him up and get him home. His parents'll worry if they can't account for him at ten o'clock."
Lex stared at the old man.
The old man stared back at him, a tiny grin on his face.
"Yes sir." Lex said.
ONE MORE PART TO COME…
I hope you guys had as much fun reading this as I had writing it, but I really don't think that's possible.