+++++++
Glancing up as they settled into their chairs, Chloe took notice for the first time of the two hulking figures standing a none-too-discreet distance away. Her eyebrow arched a question at Lex, and he sheepishly (as sheepish as a Luthor could be, anyway) replied;
"Temporary situation. There's been a recent increase in ... ah... angry letters to Lex and LuthorCorp lately. I thought that, just this once, it might be prudent."
He waited for the inevitable freeze, the look of disbelief and mild distaste that had, in the end, driven him away from Clark's friendship... Lex knew that he was nowhere near normal, and it was only a matter of time before those people that lived in the 'real world' were repelled by the too- obvious traps and trappings of his life.
He watched his companion carefully as she tilted her head oh-so-slightly, a move that he remembered from his infrequent encounters with the indomitable teenaged Chloe.
The look in her eyes was both familiar and foreign, as assessing and sharp as ever it had been, but warmer, more accessible now. Chloe Sullivan had always been open and warm with her friends, as he'd seen when he'd watched her interact with Clark. Unfortunately, he'd never counted himself amongst that small, select number. Now, though, it seemed that a tie to Smallville was warrant enough for a relenting of the barriers, and Chloe's demeanor was almost. friendly?
"You know," she remarked, and Lex was startled out of his thoughts. When had he lost the ability to think along seven tracks at once? "I shouldn't be surprised. the surprise really is that you've managed to do without them this long. you must run into this kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis."
A pause as she waited for confirmation. The rueful purse of his lips seemed all she needed.
"You should be commended, really, Lex. I never thought about it, but you must have fought hard to try and keep your life as normal as. well, as normal as possible, considering."
A jolt, the words, that someone from Smallville had the perspicacity to realize the town's resident demi-god (or demon, depending on who you'd ask) had spent several years balancing his otherworldly heritage and his embarrassingly domestic desires. Of course, he thought, if someone from Smallville was going to have that insight, it would be Chloe. The town's resident bloodhound.
He could vouchsafe no response to her words, struggling with the uncalled- for and inexplicable bloom of warmth somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. He was unclear as to its origins. perhaps the coffee at six had been a little off? Impossible, with the immaculate way his food was prepared. Surely, though, he couldn't be basking in the approval of this blunt, utterly uncomplicated little girl? Curious. Maybe he'd go see his personal physician.
She crinkled her nose at him, the silence stretching too long for her taste.
"This is the part where you say something, Lex."
He leaned forward, casually adjusting his jacket, shifting easily. No hint of his discomfiture was obvious, and he thanked the years of prep school and Lionel's personal, torturous version of training for that ability to mask it. Her eyes followed his movements and admired, as always, the grace that filled them.
"I was." He spoke slowly, deliberately, weighing each word. It was good to know, Chloe thought, that some things stayed the same. "I was just thinking about your perception, Chloe." The unasked admission to her earlier statement widened her eyes, an openness that had not been present in the young man she'd known only slightly. Perhaps he wasn't quite the same.
"You were always one of the most .aware people in Smallville. I'm glad to see that hasn't changed." An unconscious echo of her earlier words, and it caused a bit of confusion, that he'd noticed her at all. She'd been like a terrier puppy, unrelenting but ignorable at his heels.
"So, how go the journalistic efforts?" He could have kept tabs on her, as he had on Clark and Lana after their departure from Smallville, but he'd never thought to. She had, quite frankly, been a footnote in his Smallville story, dwarfed by the larger saga of Clark and his mysteries.
Her head tilted in the other direction as an indefinable expression crossed her face, and her eyes focused for an instant far into the middle distance
"Oh! That! Yeah, well, there was a change of plans in college. I'm in research now. I'm actually studying for my Ph.D."
She couldn't have surprised him more if she'd announced her impending marriage to Clark Kent. In fact, that would probably surprise him less. Chloe's crush on Clark was a fixed entity in Lex's mind, as inexorable a part of her personality as her investigative fervor and her lofty journalistic ambitions. It was safe, he decided, to show his reaction to the announcement.
He sat up abruptly, eyes widening half-humorously, half-seriously.
"What? The last time I checked, no pigs were flying, and according to my father, Hades is as warm as ever. how could it be that Chloe Sullivan no longer wants to be a star reporter?"
An uncomfortable beat as she absorbed his biting tone when he spoke of Lionel, and he remembered that plant manager's daughter or no, Chloe had never truly understood the depths of the battle raging between the two generations of Luthor men. She covered it with a smooth laugh, her smile crinkling the corners of her eyes and masking the apprehension there, and Lex wondered when Chloe Sullivan had grown up into such a .self-possessed woman. He felt as if he'd stayed the same since Smallville, ruthless and willful and wistful as ever. Weak as ever, while the people from his past became polished adults, at peace with themselves and their worlds. But perhaps he was being a touch maudlin.
"Yeah, well, the Wall of Weird had to go sometime. My roommates were starting to complain. And, well. I found out a lot of things about Truth and what it really means along the way."
Her tone went from playful to plaintive, trailing off into suggestive silence. He knew, somehow, that he had a vested interest in her epiphany, and took a wild guess.
"Clark?"
The blonde head shot up suddenly, and he knew that while her mouth had invited the inquiry, her head had not been consulted. Suddenly, he felt comfortable again, knowing that the Chloe he had known, brash and a tad awkward, still existed. The eyes took on a familiar deer-in-the-headlights look, and then she narrowed them. He could see her trying to work out his meaning and deduce if she'd revealed too much.
Sighing, he slouched back again, in a chair that was not as comfortable as it looked.
"Relax, Chloe. I figured it out years ago."
Eyes so wide she looked absurd, and then she tried to cover.
"Figured out what?"
"That Clark is. not from around here? That he's. shall we say, special?"
Her back hit the chair with a muffled thump, and she tried to control her breathing, unsuccessfully. She shut her gaping mouth, and after a few beats of mighty effort, swiftly recovered her composure. He applauded the attempt, as unnecessary as it was.
"What do you mean, Lex? Clark's from Smallville, same as Pete. And yeah, he's pretty unique, but I don't get." her voice trailed off uncertainly as the bald head before her shook ruefully, the grim smile on Lex's face blooming into full-fledged laughter tinged with a sharp edge.
"Ah, Chloe, what a good friend you are." And then, as quickly as it had come, the laughter went, leaving behind a deadly serious Lex. This Lex, Chloe knew, was closer to the public face of Lex Luthor now... the young man who'd tried so hard to be amiable in Smallville was no longer evident.
"Understand me, Chloe. My friendship with Clark was as precious to me as yours was to you... and just, I'm presuming, as you chose to keep his secret, so too did I. For many the same reasons, I would venture to guess."
The words took her aback, more so because of their utterly earnest tone. Chloe's day job might no longer be culling the lies and propaganda from the truth, but the nose she'd developed at a tender age was still very much present. There had been one thing in particular that The Nose had picked up on.
"Your friendship with Clark *was* precious? Why the past tense, Lex?"
Another small smile, and Chloe was quickly coming to the conclusion that its sheer smugness infuriated her. Why did it seem like he could predict every one of her words?
"Yes, Chloe, past tense. Deliberately so. I discovered Clark's personal truth quite a while ago... but he doesn't know."
A soft gasp from the woman who was seated across from him, and Lex's eyes shot up from their earnest contemplation of the salt cellars. They were opened, metaphorically, as he took in the expression on her face. Now *this* he hadn't known.
"You too? He never knew that you'd found out either?"
Silently, she nodded. After a minute of shared silence, she waved a hand at him wearily to continue. Now, it seemed, they had more in common than formative years spent in a cow-poke Kansas town.
"Simply put, I waited an unconscionably long time for Clark to give me the trust to go with the knowledge I already had. It never happened, and in the end, I was, immature though it may have been, *hurt* that he could never give that trust to me. In the end, I couldn't handle having the secret that I had no right too. That I would never have the right too. I pushed him away, Ms. Sullivan, from hurt and pique at the power he had over me."
He sighed ruefully, accepting and amused as he'd never been before of his own weaknesses.
"The power of a teenage boy I'd considered a brother ...but he never really opened up to me."
His words trailed off, sliding into the air with a wistfulness that could not be hidden. The silence this time was filled with remembered grief for the most intense friendship either of them had ever known. It seeped up through their pores from places embedded deep within, through wounds that should have long healed over. It filled the space between them, and Chloe's words dropped into it like stones into mud.
"Especially after he told Pete and Lana."
They were a quiet whisper, but the weary anguish in them still throbbed with intensity. It was an old hurt, worn soft around the edges, and it called to an identical ache in him. Lex wondered anew if there was something in Clark's unusual heritage to explain the powerful pull he had on the people around him.
He sighed again, and rubbed his hand over his scalp, an old affectation he'd never outgrown completely.
"I didn't know about Lana. I'd guessed about Pete, but..."
"Halfway through junior year. A week before they started dating."
"Huh..."
No other words were needed. They did indeed have more in common than they'd ever known... the two left outside the golden circle, not to be trusted for their ulterior motives and incessant curiosity. Not to be trusted...
A few more minutes, and Lex pulled himself from the morass of memories that had surrounded Smallville, enough to chase him to Metropolis, enough to be a not-insignificant factor in his decision to base LexCorp out of New York... far away from Kansas. He sighed roughly, trying to put the thoughts behind him. Unbidden, one unanswered question tumbled from his lips.
"So why didn't you...."
The words came from Lex without thought, and he cursed himself. Did he really want to spend this time mulling over old issues? He'd have been better off twiddling his thumbs and staring at crowds.
Chloe looked as if she was thinking much the same thing, Lex thought ruefully. Except... the curiosity was undeniable. Lex had had a dozen reasons for not confronting the Kents, but Chloe Sullivan, one of his innocuous adolescent friends? What reason could she have?
A determined expression settled upon the familiar-yet-foreign features, and she gave him back the openness he'd been so generous with throughout their odd discussion.
"I needed Clark to trust me, Lex. I didn't need to be the snoopy reporter friend that had ferreted out his secret through fair means or foul. We'd already had enough problems with that already."
Lex accepted the words with yet another pang of recognition. Their stories were so similar, he wondered what would have happened had they discovered this when still in Smallville, still around the Kents. Would they have had the courage, then, to confront their common best friend? His meandering thoughts were interrupted as Chloe sat forward and her tone became urgent, intense... demanding.
"Which, by the way, I wasn't. His secret was glaringly obvious if you even thought to look for something out of the ordinary... and there was plenty out of the ordinary about Clark Kent and his actions. it was like a neon sign pointing the way. I never went looking for the truth about him after that time I looked into his adoption, as God is my witness."
The words had the ring of often-rehearsed to him, and he wondered if she'd practiced it, if it was her version of the speech he'd given in his head dozens of times. The speech that would tell Clark that Lex had figured out The Secret, that it was alright to be honest... that would get it all out in the open... *finally*. The speech he'd never given.
"I believe you Chloe. It sounds like we had very much the same experience. I only wish I'd known at the time. What did you do, after you figured out he wasn't going to tell you?"
It went beyond curiosity now, and fell into intense scrutiny... he really wanted to know how closely her journey through the greatest of Smallville's secrets mirrored his.
She had no great epiphanies or revelations to offer him, no easily made decisions or firm conclusions. Only her truth, sad and tarnished as it was.
"What could I do, Lex? What did he leave to me? I was trapped with the knowledge, but I couldn't... *wouldn't* share that with him when he wouldn't give it to me. I didn't deserve it from him, that lack of trust. Reporter or no, there are things that go beyond the scoop. I'd thought Clark's friendship was one of them, but..."
A shadow of shame in his heart, that the younger Lex Luthor had been so carried away with his pique he'd never noticed what had occurred under his nose. He wasn't surprised... Lex of old had been a self-centered, reactionary creature, never noticing the currents around him unless they served to his advantage. And Chloe's anger would not have served any advantage to his own, though she had been more justified in that anger than he. Lex was well aware that his story was not so pristine ... he had poked and pried incessantly before he realized the importance of the other young man's presence in his life, before his father's training was largely undone by the wholesome atmosphere of Smallville. He had used fair means and foul, and Lex knew he was no innocent in this tale. Many would say that he had no right to feel injured, that both he and Clark had betrayed the friendship. That, however, did not make the hurt, as irrational as it might be, any less real.
"So, I covered his tracks as best I could without him knowing, helped in the only way I could, and waited. And when the waiting went on too long, things just... faded away. I knew that without the trust we didn't really have anything worth maintaining. We went to Met U., and he became a journalism major, and I... became a chemistry major, transferred to Northwestern, and it... just ended."
His interest was piqued by several of the statements she'd made, his thoughts skittering off on a dozen different tangents, but he knew that this wasn't the moment. A hesitant pause, and then a pale, slender hand reached out to where her calloused fingers were worrying the edge of the linen tablecloth. It cupped over her palms and stilled their nervous movement, transmitting silently his depths of shared pain and understanding. No fairy tale ending for them, no cleansing and cathartic confrontation to let it all come out. Only the sad, twisted unraveling of something they'd both thought to be more precious and pure than it had been. The realization of taint was something he'd never grow accustomed to, for all the rest of his days.
Several long minutes passed, as waiters hustled by and the muted clink and clatter of fine china filled the space between them. It was amazing, but Lex could feel the bottled hurt and impotent anger of years past drain away, the communion felt in sharing that hurt with another person ameliorating the negative emotions almost entirely. Was this what the poets and counselors spoke of when they rhapsodized about 'sharing and caring'? Perhaps, mused Lex, the Luthors weren't entirely correct in their scoffing at such a peasant concept. Perhaps he ought to do it more often. Beat fencing any day.
Chloe sighed, a long, languorous exhalation ... pushing out the same ugly and old feelings that had been stirred up in him. It was even more amazing, Lex thought, that this one shared point of reference - admittedly not inconsiderable -- should make him feel as if he knew this girl, this virtual stranger, inside and out in ways he'd never known any of a long line of acquaintances, schoolmates and partners in destruction. But again, he was probably being melodramatic.
Another few minutes, and the hum around them broke through the cocoon of misery they'd constructed, pulling them back into the concrete world that was eons away from Smallville. She shifted, he lifted a hand for the waiter's attention, and they shook off the past. There was much more to both Chloe Sullivan and Lex Luthor now than Smallville.
Glancing up as they settled into their chairs, Chloe took notice for the first time of the two hulking figures standing a none-too-discreet distance away. Her eyebrow arched a question at Lex, and he sheepishly (as sheepish as a Luthor could be, anyway) replied;
"Temporary situation. There's been a recent increase in ... ah... angry letters to Lex and LuthorCorp lately. I thought that, just this once, it might be prudent."
He waited for the inevitable freeze, the look of disbelief and mild distaste that had, in the end, driven him away from Clark's friendship... Lex knew that he was nowhere near normal, and it was only a matter of time before those people that lived in the 'real world' were repelled by the too- obvious traps and trappings of his life.
He watched his companion carefully as she tilted her head oh-so-slightly, a move that he remembered from his infrequent encounters with the indomitable teenaged Chloe.
The look in her eyes was both familiar and foreign, as assessing and sharp as ever it had been, but warmer, more accessible now. Chloe Sullivan had always been open and warm with her friends, as he'd seen when he'd watched her interact with Clark. Unfortunately, he'd never counted himself amongst that small, select number. Now, though, it seemed that a tie to Smallville was warrant enough for a relenting of the barriers, and Chloe's demeanor was almost. friendly?
"You know," she remarked, and Lex was startled out of his thoughts. When had he lost the ability to think along seven tracks at once? "I shouldn't be surprised. the surprise really is that you've managed to do without them this long. you must run into this kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis."
A pause as she waited for confirmation. The rueful purse of his lips seemed all she needed.
"You should be commended, really, Lex. I never thought about it, but you must have fought hard to try and keep your life as normal as. well, as normal as possible, considering."
A jolt, the words, that someone from Smallville had the perspicacity to realize the town's resident demi-god (or demon, depending on who you'd ask) had spent several years balancing his otherworldly heritage and his embarrassingly domestic desires. Of course, he thought, if someone from Smallville was going to have that insight, it would be Chloe. The town's resident bloodhound.
He could vouchsafe no response to her words, struggling with the uncalled- for and inexplicable bloom of warmth somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. He was unclear as to its origins. perhaps the coffee at six had been a little off? Impossible, with the immaculate way his food was prepared. Surely, though, he couldn't be basking in the approval of this blunt, utterly uncomplicated little girl? Curious. Maybe he'd go see his personal physician.
She crinkled her nose at him, the silence stretching too long for her taste.
"This is the part where you say something, Lex."
He leaned forward, casually adjusting his jacket, shifting easily. No hint of his discomfiture was obvious, and he thanked the years of prep school and Lionel's personal, torturous version of training for that ability to mask it. Her eyes followed his movements and admired, as always, the grace that filled them.
"I was." He spoke slowly, deliberately, weighing each word. It was good to know, Chloe thought, that some things stayed the same. "I was just thinking about your perception, Chloe." The unasked admission to her earlier statement widened her eyes, an openness that had not been present in the young man she'd known only slightly. Perhaps he wasn't quite the same.
"You were always one of the most .aware people in Smallville. I'm glad to see that hasn't changed." An unconscious echo of her earlier words, and it caused a bit of confusion, that he'd noticed her at all. She'd been like a terrier puppy, unrelenting but ignorable at his heels.
"So, how go the journalistic efforts?" He could have kept tabs on her, as he had on Clark and Lana after their departure from Smallville, but he'd never thought to. She had, quite frankly, been a footnote in his Smallville story, dwarfed by the larger saga of Clark and his mysteries.
Her head tilted in the other direction as an indefinable expression crossed her face, and her eyes focused for an instant far into the middle distance
"Oh! That! Yeah, well, there was a change of plans in college. I'm in research now. I'm actually studying for my Ph.D."
She couldn't have surprised him more if she'd announced her impending marriage to Clark Kent. In fact, that would probably surprise him less. Chloe's crush on Clark was a fixed entity in Lex's mind, as inexorable a part of her personality as her investigative fervor and her lofty journalistic ambitions. It was safe, he decided, to show his reaction to the announcement.
He sat up abruptly, eyes widening half-humorously, half-seriously.
"What? The last time I checked, no pigs were flying, and according to my father, Hades is as warm as ever. how could it be that Chloe Sullivan no longer wants to be a star reporter?"
An uncomfortable beat as she absorbed his biting tone when he spoke of Lionel, and he remembered that plant manager's daughter or no, Chloe had never truly understood the depths of the battle raging between the two generations of Luthor men. She covered it with a smooth laugh, her smile crinkling the corners of her eyes and masking the apprehension there, and Lex wondered when Chloe Sullivan had grown up into such a .self-possessed woman. He felt as if he'd stayed the same since Smallville, ruthless and willful and wistful as ever. Weak as ever, while the people from his past became polished adults, at peace with themselves and their worlds. But perhaps he was being a touch maudlin.
"Yeah, well, the Wall of Weird had to go sometime. My roommates were starting to complain. And, well. I found out a lot of things about Truth and what it really means along the way."
Her tone went from playful to plaintive, trailing off into suggestive silence. He knew, somehow, that he had a vested interest in her epiphany, and took a wild guess.
"Clark?"
The blonde head shot up suddenly, and he knew that while her mouth had invited the inquiry, her head had not been consulted. Suddenly, he felt comfortable again, knowing that the Chloe he had known, brash and a tad awkward, still existed. The eyes took on a familiar deer-in-the-headlights look, and then she narrowed them. He could see her trying to work out his meaning and deduce if she'd revealed too much.
Sighing, he slouched back again, in a chair that was not as comfortable as it looked.
"Relax, Chloe. I figured it out years ago."
Eyes so wide she looked absurd, and then she tried to cover.
"Figured out what?"
"That Clark is. not from around here? That he's. shall we say, special?"
Her back hit the chair with a muffled thump, and she tried to control her breathing, unsuccessfully. She shut her gaping mouth, and after a few beats of mighty effort, swiftly recovered her composure. He applauded the attempt, as unnecessary as it was.
"What do you mean, Lex? Clark's from Smallville, same as Pete. And yeah, he's pretty unique, but I don't get." her voice trailed off uncertainly as the bald head before her shook ruefully, the grim smile on Lex's face blooming into full-fledged laughter tinged with a sharp edge.
"Ah, Chloe, what a good friend you are." And then, as quickly as it had come, the laughter went, leaving behind a deadly serious Lex. This Lex, Chloe knew, was closer to the public face of Lex Luthor now... the young man who'd tried so hard to be amiable in Smallville was no longer evident.
"Understand me, Chloe. My friendship with Clark was as precious to me as yours was to you... and just, I'm presuming, as you chose to keep his secret, so too did I. For many the same reasons, I would venture to guess."
The words took her aback, more so because of their utterly earnest tone. Chloe's day job might no longer be culling the lies and propaganda from the truth, but the nose she'd developed at a tender age was still very much present. There had been one thing in particular that The Nose had picked up on.
"Your friendship with Clark *was* precious? Why the past tense, Lex?"
Another small smile, and Chloe was quickly coming to the conclusion that its sheer smugness infuriated her. Why did it seem like he could predict every one of her words?
"Yes, Chloe, past tense. Deliberately so. I discovered Clark's personal truth quite a while ago... but he doesn't know."
A soft gasp from the woman who was seated across from him, and Lex's eyes shot up from their earnest contemplation of the salt cellars. They were opened, metaphorically, as he took in the expression on her face. Now *this* he hadn't known.
"You too? He never knew that you'd found out either?"
Silently, she nodded. After a minute of shared silence, she waved a hand at him wearily to continue. Now, it seemed, they had more in common than formative years spent in a cow-poke Kansas town.
"Simply put, I waited an unconscionably long time for Clark to give me the trust to go with the knowledge I already had. It never happened, and in the end, I was, immature though it may have been, *hurt* that he could never give that trust to me. In the end, I couldn't handle having the secret that I had no right too. That I would never have the right too. I pushed him away, Ms. Sullivan, from hurt and pique at the power he had over me."
He sighed ruefully, accepting and amused as he'd never been before of his own weaknesses.
"The power of a teenage boy I'd considered a brother ...but he never really opened up to me."
His words trailed off, sliding into the air with a wistfulness that could not be hidden. The silence this time was filled with remembered grief for the most intense friendship either of them had ever known. It seeped up through their pores from places embedded deep within, through wounds that should have long healed over. It filled the space between them, and Chloe's words dropped into it like stones into mud.
"Especially after he told Pete and Lana."
They were a quiet whisper, but the weary anguish in them still throbbed with intensity. It was an old hurt, worn soft around the edges, and it called to an identical ache in him. Lex wondered anew if there was something in Clark's unusual heritage to explain the powerful pull he had on the people around him.
He sighed again, and rubbed his hand over his scalp, an old affectation he'd never outgrown completely.
"I didn't know about Lana. I'd guessed about Pete, but..."
"Halfway through junior year. A week before they started dating."
"Huh..."
No other words were needed. They did indeed have more in common than they'd ever known... the two left outside the golden circle, not to be trusted for their ulterior motives and incessant curiosity. Not to be trusted...
A few more minutes, and Lex pulled himself from the morass of memories that had surrounded Smallville, enough to chase him to Metropolis, enough to be a not-insignificant factor in his decision to base LexCorp out of New York... far away from Kansas. He sighed roughly, trying to put the thoughts behind him. Unbidden, one unanswered question tumbled from his lips.
"So why didn't you...."
The words came from Lex without thought, and he cursed himself. Did he really want to spend this time mulling over old issues? He'd have been better off twiddling his thumbs and staring at crowds.
Chloe looked as if she was thinking much the same thing, Lex thought ruefully. Except... the curiosity was undeniable. Lex had had a dozen reasons for not confronting the Kents, but Chloe Sullivan, one of his innocuous adolescent friends? What reason could she have?
A determined expression settled upon the familiar-yet-foreign features, and she gave him back the openness he'd been so generous with throughout their odd discussion.
"I needed Clark to trust me, Lex. I didn't need to be the snoopy reporter friend that had ferreted out his secret through fair means or foul. We'd already had enough problems with that already."
Lex accepted the words with yet another pang of recognition. Their stories were so similar, he wondered what would have happened had they discovered this when still in Smallville, still around the Kents. Would they have had the courage, then, to confront their common best friend? His meandering thoughts were interrupted as Chloe sat forward and her tone became urgent, intense... demanding.
"Which, by the way, I wasn't. His secret was glaringly obvious if you even thought to look for something out of the ordinary... and there was plenty out of the ordinary about Clark Kent and his actions. it was like a neon sign pointing the way. I never went looking for the truth about him after that time I looked into his adoption, as God is my witness."
The words had the ring of often-rehearsed to him, and he wondered if she'd practiced it, if it was her version of the speech he'd given in his head dozens of times. The speech that would tell Clark that Lex had figured out The Secret, that it was alright to be honest... that would get it all out in the open... *finally*. The speech he'd never given.
"I believe you Chloe. It sounds like we had very much the same experience. I only wish I'd known at the time. What did you do, after you figured out he wasn't going to tell you?"
It went beyond curiosity now, and fell into intense scrutiny... he really wanted to know how closely her journey through the greatest of Smallville's secrets mirrored his.
She had no great epiphanies or revelations to offer him, no easily made decisions or firm conclusions. Only her truth, sad and tarnished as it was.
"What could I do, Lex? What did he leave to me? I was trapped with the knowledge, but I couldn't... *wouldn't* share that with him when he wouldn't give it to me. I didn't deserve it from him, that lack of trust. Reporter or no, there are things that go beyond the scoop. I'd thought Clark's friendship was one of them, but..."
A shadow of shame in his heart, that the younger Lex Luthor had been so carried away with his pique he'd never noticed what had occurred under his nose. He wasn't surprised... Lex of old had been a self-centered, reactionary creature, never noticing the currents around him unless they served to his advantage. And Chloe's anger would not have served any advantage to his own, though she had been more justified in that anger than he. Lex was well aware that his story was not so pristine ... he had poked and pried incessantly before he realized the importance of the other young man's presence in his life, before his father's training was largely undone by the wholesome atmosphere of Smallville. He had used fair means and foul, and Lex knew he was no innocent in this tale. Many would say that he had no right to feel injured, that both he and Clark had betrayed the friendship. That, however, did not make the hurt, as irrational as it might be, any less real.
"So, I covered his tracks as best I could without him knowing, helped in the only way I could, and waited. And when the waiting went on too long, things just... faded away. I knew that without the trust we didn't really have anything worth maintaining. We went to Met U., and he became a journalism major, and I... became a chemistry major, transferred to Northwestern, and it... just ended."
His interest was piqued by several of the statements she'd made, his thoughts skittering off on a dozen different tangents, but he knew that this wasn't the moment. A hesitant pause, and then a pale, slender hand reached out to where her calloused fingers were worrying the edge of the linen tablecloth. It cupped over her palms and stilled their nervous movement, transmitting silently his depths of shared pain and understanding. No fairy tale ending for them, no cleansing and cathartic confrontation to let it all come out. Only the sad, twisted unraveling of something they'd both thought to be more precious and pure than it had been. The realization of taint was something he'd never grow accustomed to, for all the rest of his days.
Several long minutes passed, as waiters hustled by and the muted clink and clatter of fine china filled the space between them. It was amazing, but Lex could feel the bottled hurt and impotent anger of years past drain away, the communion felt in sharing that hurt with another person ameliorating the negative emotions almost entirely. Was this what the poets and counselors spoke of when they rhapsodized about 'sharing and caring'? Perhaps, mused Lex, the Luthors weren't entirely correct in their scoffing at such a peasant concept. Perhaps he ought to do it more often. Beat fencing any day.
Chloe sighed, a long, languorous exhalation ... pushing out the same ugly and old feelings that had been stirred up in him. It was even more amazing, Lex thought, that this one shared point of reference - admittedly not inconsiderable -- should make him feel as if he knew this girl, this virtual stranger, inside and out in ways he'd never known any of a long line of acquaintances, schoolmates and partners in destruction. But again, he was probably being melodramatic.
Another few minutes, and the hum around them broke through the cocoon of misery they'd constructed, pulling them back into the concrete world that was eons away from Smallville. She shifted, he lifted a hand for the waiter's attention, and they shook off the past. There was much more to both Chloe Sullivan and Lex Luthor now than Smallville.