Man and...
Disclaimer: these two are owned by others, even if they do belong to the whole world.
Author's Note: no matter how many times we wonder what happened between the two, we'll never really know...
Title cheerfully stolen from Nietzsche, who wasn't really all that insightful anyway.
"...and in the financial news today, the top story is the government's 11th-hour decision not to permit LexCorp to proceed with phase 2 testing of its new longevity drug, following allegations of improper testing procedures. Due to the confidential nature of the studies, rumors of an inside informant cannot be -- "
Lex snapped off the TV irritably. " 'Inside informant'," he sneered at the now-blank wall-screen. "Is that your secret identity these days, Clark?" He shoved back from the ostentatious and nearly barren desk and stood abruptly, too angry to keep still, yet striving to project an aura of cool control and commanding presence even when there was no one there to appreciate it. (Luthor's third law: practice makes perfect). But he was honest enough to admit to himself that he really felt like stamping his feet and swearing. Maybe even kicking the desk.
"How'd you get inside, anyway, 'Kal-El'?" He invoked the hated alien name to empty air with a particularly vicious flatness. "The sensors should have picked you up the second you crossed the interior doors. I should have found you down on your hands and knees before you reached the secure offices, never mind the labs. Level three barriers, my ass!"
He paced, trying to regain his self-discipline. Luthors show only the emotions we elect to. "Or did you get someone else to do your dirty work for you? Maybe that woman you've been drooling over, hm? Oh yes, Lois is everything my ill-fated wives never were. Self-possessed, self-reliant, sufficient unto herself. One who can keep secrets and have a life of her own without stabbing you in the back. A fitting match for a Superman."
Lex paused, clenching his fists. "Is that why you picked her, Clark? Or was it to rub my nose in my -- "
He almost said "failures," and choked on the word. But the thought that insinuated itself unbidden into his inner dialog was worse, far worse.
In my replacement. In our lost friendship. In what I should have been.
It should have been me guarding your back, complementing your strengths, doing the few things you can't. I shouldn't be sitting here, master of all I survey, wanting for nothing, needing nothing --
-- Except for the only thing I ever valued, the trust and respect and friendship of someone who wasn't in the least impressed by Luthor, and cared only about Lex.
But then, you never really did trust me, did you, Clark? You never did let me in past that one, last, all-important mask.
Lex stared out at the view of his city through the single-pane metallized-plasglass plate that made up one entire wall of his court-sized office. It was a piece of engineering to flaunt all by itself: bulletproof, storm-proof, nearly self-cleaning with its built-in repellent charge, polarizable. The nano-layer weave made it stronger than steel. He could lean back against its near-invisibility while intimidating visitors, even prop his foot up against it, his silhouette framed by the skyline, arms folded and legs crossed as if supported on air. He could slam his fist against it to make a point and watch his supplicants flinch and pale nervously, without disturbing it the tiniest rattle.
The achievement gave him no comfort. Somewhere out there, on the other side of his invisible prison wall, was his nemesis, who needed no illusion of being supported by empty air, who commanded at whim a far greater view of his city than he ever would, who could go through his marvelous near-invulnerable shield as if it were so much expensive tissue paper.
A man -- no, scratch that -- a being, who mocked all his hard-won successes simply by the accident of being born.
A sentient being, but a thing nonetheless, who fate had been cruel enough to throw in his face.
His most implacable enemy.
The only -- person -- he had ever dared to call friend.
I made that one exception, just for you, Clark. For what I thought we could be, together.
But you never were really Clark, were you? I wonder if I would have liked, trusted, even wanted to believe in, Kal-El, if I had ever gotten the chance.
Probably not. Clark would never run around in that garish outfit, parading that stupid name.
But we'll never know, will we? Because you weren't willing to take that chance.
It went against all my training, my nature, to lower my guard and let you in. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I won that battle with myself, because I thought you were worth it. Because I hoped you would think I was worth it to make that effort, too.
All I asked was that you take that one final step, that you let me in and tell me the truth. All I asked was that you believe in me, the way I risked believing in you.
And you wouldn't.
Lex wandered back to his desk, too distracted to keep up the pose of pacing. It still hurt. Even after all the years, all the battles, all the losses cut and all the triumphs savored, it still knotted his gut to remember looking into Clark's eyes -- those wide, clear, changeable, depthless eyes -- waiting, hoping, coming as close as a Luthor could come to begging -- for the cold blankness behind their practiced friendliness to open. Searching for even a flicker of surrender, of hesitancy, or maybe just a little nervousness -- that might hint that Clark would finally admit, however reluctantly, to the secret that so sharply defined him, that set him so obviously apart, even if you had no clue what it was.
Lex, of all people, had plenty of clues. He had pretty well nailed down the whole story, down to everything except the scientific mechanisms and proper names, within a year of his ignominious arrival in Smallville, a spectacular embarrassment complete with vehicular homicide of a popular local teenager and an extraordinarily mundane death himself. The fact that neither of them had died, when by all rights and laws of physics they both should have, tended to get your attention.
He hadn't needed any admission from Clark to bolster his faith in his own well-trained analytical abilities. He'd only needed for Clark to tell him the truth ... to prove that Clark trusted him, and valued him, enough to actually tell him the truth.
But Clark had simply met his eyes, those shimmering mirror-deep hazel irises reflecting both cornfield-green and summer-sky blue (how did he do that?), with their dancing promise of endless fascination -- utterly empty behind a deflecting mask of bemused self-deprecation.
And lied to him.
Even now, surrounded by all the trappings of power and success, it still twisted his face into a snarl, and his stomach into something suspiciously like the feeling lesser mortals got when churning emotions made them physically ill, to recall those moments, burned forever into his brain: the down-home, aw-shucks, hard-workin', honest-as-the-day-is-long farmboy, that he knew instantly when he became the alien powerhouse in the horrid costume, who claimed to stand above all for truth.
The only person to whom Lex had voluntarily bared his soul ... Lex would never forget Clark looking him in the eyes, and unyieldingly denying Lex the same in return.
The Clark he had so much wanted just to exist, to be his equal and complement, to match his ambitions against and strive to be worthy of, had turned out not to have any substance at all. There was only a false shell, a human-shaped cover for something not human, a chameleon poser that he had been trying to measure up to. A phantom ideal.
There was no Clark. Not-Clark was some alien thing, some cold and unfathomable creature who neither understood nor cared about the emotions he stirred in human beings. The unfillable emptiness behind that smiling lie had drained Lex of the fragile warmth he had so hesitantly tendered; had taken it all, and given nothing in return.
Clark wasn't real. Clark had nothing to give.
Lex's wanderings took him unseeing past the pictures of LexCorp properties, and charts, and works in progress that gave identity to his walls in place of the usual photographs posed with famous people. He spurned such pitiful sops to lesser egos. Presidents sought him out, not vice versa. There were no humans important enough or interesting enough for him to care to bother seeing on a daily basis. There were no friends to have pictures of.
He paused, brooding, back at his desk. No pictures there, either. The computer screens were blank. No patterns or colors making abstracts to tempt the eye. Certainly nothing red or blue.
"I wonder," Lex said softly. He always wondered, on those fairly rare but still all-too-often occasions when the flying freak intruded on his business and reminded him forcibly of what he would so much rather forget. "I wonder..."
He went back to his window, staring out, not seeing the actual view so much as picturing in his mind one small specific part of it -- a nondescript apartment that he had never seen in person, but knew as well as his own office.
An apartment, like the farmhouse of so long ago, that might once have opened its door to him and invited him inside.
Maybe for a beer, or just an evening of kicking back and swapping outrageous stories about the foibles they had to deal with during the day, two old friends shedding their oh-so-public personas, not having to be on guard against the rest of the world for a change, relaxing in nothing more complicated than comfortable companionship.
The place that might, just, well, might, have been a homey retreat -- a place to go to be with a friend -- for him, too.
If only Clark had been real.
Inside the nondescript apartment in question, Clark Kent né Kal-El was doing pretty much exactly that. His dad's tattered old bathrobe was a warm cocoon for his unnaturally acute senses, and relaxation was one of the few things that could not be done at compressed-perception speed. He snuggled unabashedly in the soft-worn material, smelling of years of farm and sun, letting his vision and hearing drift idly around the city. He caught the news broadcast regarding LexCorp's latest setback, and smiled a little at their investigation's success, but sadly.
He took no pleasure in Lex's defeats. He only wished Lex hadn't made it necessary.
Jimmy had done some fine undercover work there, brazening his way through LexCorp's labs disguised with only hair dye and glasses. (The passing thought brought Jimmy to his attention, and Clark's eyebrows went up involuntarily at Jimmy's choice of entertainment for the evening for celebration. Ah, well, live and let live...) Mrs. Olsen's little boy packed charm as thick as his freckles, backed by a shrewd instinct for getting to the bottom of a puzzle that even Bruce had grudgingly complimented.
Jimmy had taken the lead and run with it as soon as the idea of inserting a mole into Lex's labs had come up. Clark hadn't even had to invent any excuses for hanging back. "C'mon, C.K., old Lexy knows you from way back. He'd spot you in a Metropolis minute. Me, a bad pair of glasses like yours and he wouldn't know me if I shined his shoes."
Clark had still been reluctant -- he could keep an eye on Jimmy, but he would be almost helpless to pull his pal out if things got rough. Lex had been serious about keeping Clark out of the labs, and didn't bother to use lead to disguise it. Lex wasn't just working with kryptonite. He had all but painted the walls with refined meteor rock in the lower levels, the private access areas trimmed from baseboard to door framing to light panels in pure dull green. The only things shielded from the dim poisonous glow were the experiments and instruments themselves.
It made Clark queasy just looking at it via telescopic x-ray. The lengths Lex had gone to were a slap in his face. Lex could not possible have expected Clark to take it any other way, not just as a tip-off that he was up to something, but as an open challenge. Had he really believed that Clark would barge in there half cocked, making a spectacle of himself by puking all over the floor, in either set of clothes?
(Clark admitted wryly to himself that he had, in fact, done just that, often enough, as a teenager, the teenager's typical conviction of immortality dangerously bolstered at the time by the fact that everything native to this planet really was kid's-toy harmless to him. He had been every bit as mule-headed about forgetting just how easily, and how badly, he actually could be hurt, as any kid who insisted on climbing on, or playing with, or eating things he shouldn't.)
But Lex hadn't counted on the resourcefulness of Clark's friends. The thought made Clark sigh, as always. Lex, who had proven his brilliance and determination both, over and over again, had every right to his monumental ego. It was only a shame that he didn't recognize, or at least didn't admit, that others could have talents just as superlative in their own rights.
There was iron-willed Perry with his bloodhound instincts, who still managed to treat Clark -- his subordinate and nowhere near his best reporter, with occasional disappointed contempt ranging all the way to disgusted hollering outrage -- and Superman, the world's idol and a personal hero -- as two separate people, with a thoroughness that bordered on selective amnesia.
(Clark harbored no illusions that Perry hadn't recognized him, or remembered his days in Smallville with a clarity that no one drinking that heavily should have been able to. Maybe Perry was a meteor mutant himself. Maybe alcohol and meteorites were a dangerous combination all on their own... But Perry had given himself away exactly once, when some wacko had barged into the newsroom waving one of Chloe's old Torch articles about meteorite mutations in one hand and a piece of kryptonite in the other, and Perry had slipped just long enough to shoot a panicked look in Clark's direction before physically booting the guy out. Clark hadn't even had time to feel anything except dizzy and a momentary body cramp. Perry had actually gone back down in the elevator with the guy, chewing him a new one at a volume that Clark hadn't much needed super-sensitive hearing to follow, and confiscated the meteorite. And taken an extended lunch hour to find a lead box before returning to the news room.)
Or Lois... Diamond-edged Lois, as quick and incisive and dangerous as they came, with a depth and ability to empathize hidden beneath her self-imposed exoskeleton that awed him even to catch a glimpse of. No wonder she and his mom got along so well -- if those two ever conspired against him, he was toast.
(All gods help the whole planet if Chloe ever came back from wherever she'd disappeared to -- Hammond had looked him coolly in the face and told him it was none of his business, unless he decided to join up -- and Lois and Chloe got back together. Lex should count himself damn lucky that he'd never tried to cross Chloe.)
And even adventurous young Jimmy, never afraid to take action into his own hands, wily and dedicated and with a fire in his belly to match his hair. His free-spiritedness and his rock-steady determination were equal and opposite forces that could have launched rockets if they could be harnessed. Whenever anyone spoke of Superman's passion for justice, Clark thought of Jimmy and snorted at his own inadequacy by comparison.
Clark sometimes got the distinct impression that Lois and Jimmy were just teasing him, playing along with the whole secret-identity shtick. ("So, C.K., if you were old Lexy, where would you hide the dirt? You should know all his bad habits. It's not like you'd need x-ray vision to figure out the best places to poke around.")
Lex ... Lex would have fit right in with his circle of high-achieving friends -- if only he'd wanted to. If only he'd been willing to accept Clark for what he was, all that he was -- and only what he was, instead of wanting him to be extraordinary, more than human, in every way. Lex expected more from Clark than just the extraterrestrial physiology, and Clark could not give him that. Clark didn't even know how to figure out what it was that Lex wanted.
Lex did not want Clark to be a man, not even a superman. He seemed to need to demand someone, something, absolutely perfect, an unattainable ideal to set himself against. Lex was fixated on the idea that, if Clark were some sort of ultimate, then by matching himself against that absolute standard, he would achieve the pinnacle of perfection too. A godhead.
Clark had tried to shake him of that inherently flawed idea, that futile ambition. I'm nothing special, Lex. Somehow his talent for rendering the human condition in newspaper prose did not extend to trying to explain himself in words. I was born with these physical characteristics, these alien's idea of designer genes. That doesn't make me homo superior. I just means I shouldn't compete at physical activities against the natives of this planet and sun.
Maybe I was sent to take the world's matters into my own hands, or maybe this body just had to be extra tough in order to survive the trip, much less the risks of being a baby in some societies here. I was luckier than the ones who sent me had any right to count on in being found by the Kents. You're tougher than I am in a lot of ways, Lex, just to have survived a childhood under Lionel. But it would have taken more than your strength and mine put together to make it in some of the places on this planet, even in this relatively wealthy and peaceful country. And yet other people, other children, do it all the time...
The things this body can do doesn't define, or change, or improve, who I am. Why couldn't you accept and be happy with what we had, Lex? I can understand your drive for greatness. I'm never satisfied with doing any less than the best I can do, either. And you're better than I am at so many things. But I could never spend all my energies on trying to be great at the expense of everything else, everything that lets me feel -- human.
Not at the cost of losing my connection with everyone around me, with the me that grew up in Smallville and walks around with you today.
I can't risk taking the kind of chances that you take with walking the edge, especially not just to try to prove something. I'm NOT better than everyone. I just have the potential to do more harm than anyone else could ever do if I ever screw up. I just can't afford to be so dangerously wrong.
You asked me who I really am. Why wouldn't you accept, believe, the answer? I'm the same man you always knew. Does it make so much difference that I'm from another planet? Because if it does ... then I guess I didn't really know you after all.
For all your complexities, for all your ambitions, I always thought that the most important thing was that we not only didn't want anything from one another, but that we honestly accepted each other for what we each are. That the public trappings and dealings didn't matter, not between us personally. That we were friends, that it didn't matter about all the other things that set us apart, that made us different both from each other and from the rest of the world. Not just because we were both alone.
If I was wrong about that, then we didn't ever really have that friendship. Because I'm not some alien icon of superiority for you to either match or tear down. I'm the kid who fished you out of the river, the teenager who coveted your cars and entertainment system, the man who admired your successes ... and who dies a little inside, every time you do something less than worthy of the Lex I knew and respected.
Because if you're not really the Lex I thought I knew, then how can I be the Clark who thought you were my friend?
'Who am I really,' Lex? I thought you knew. If you didn't, then who did you believe I was -- and why did you want that person in your imagination close to you? As a yardstick -- or as a tool?
Of all the things he'd ever feared being totally wrong about, misjudging Lex -- reading friendship and acceptance where there turned out to be only manipulation and competition and need -- hurt the worst. Pete had been Clark's friend, but had never really been comfortable with his best buddy being other than human. (It was one reason he had never come right out and told Lois and Jimmy, or even called Perry on his obvious game -- for that matter, he hadn't come right out and told Bruce or Hal or Ollie, all humans themselves, in the final analysis, despite the masks and gadgets -- the fear that, while suspicion and the feeling of holding a trump card over the incomprehensibly powerful alien might be tantalizing and comforting, the bald truth might drive an unbreakable psychological wedge between them.)
Only Lex had actually wanted Clark and Kal-El to be one and the same -- and for all the wrong reasons.
Thinking of Lex had naturally focused his attention on the man in the office below the penthouse, as if tuning into his brooding aura. Therefore, he had almost a second's warning -- plenty of time, at his speed, to brace himself -- when Lex's finger reached out and stabbed down on the shielded console. Still, ow. Clark gritted his teeth against the ultrasonic shriek suddenly blanketing the city to the curve of the horizon.
There were any number of ways to escape it, all of which he'd used. The sound died away after a couple of hundred miles in any direction, including straight up, overwhelmed by the general noise of the atmosphere (the startling sizzle of incipient lightning in the clouds, whispering to him in the Earth's own language of hidden power), or lost in the thinning molecules of space as the planet's fragile blanket of life gave way to the purity of vacuum. (The Sun! It had been his 21st "birthday" present to himself, pushing his still-not-quite-mastered bargain with gravity, higher and higher until there was nothing more to deflect or dampen the raw radiation flooding into him. Space wasn't at all cold to him, except in deepest shadow; sun fire filled him like the headiest of nectars.)
But only one thing would make it stop -- would end, for awhile, the waves of bitterness directed at him. Clark sighed, and stood, shrugging off his father's bathrobe and the peacefulness of relaxation together with the same practiced resignation. The responsibility to duty so carefully instilled in him by his parents had become force of habit.
Duty called, and the reflex veneer of the icon of truth and justice settled into place in an automatic response. Clark didn't even think about it any more. He supposed it was like getting into a flashy car, or donning ostentatious jewelry. Just putting on the presence, the appearance, something for the world to see.
Clark hovered outside the LexCorp mural window, giving the place a once-over -- again, an all-too-familiar habit -- while he waited for Lex to decide how long to take to notice him. As usual, there were bits and pieces of the enervating green rock subtly placed throughout, as if for low-key accent -- a stylish built-in divider/organizer, each precisely-sized receptacle thinly edged in soft glowing green against naturally green-veined black marble; the finger-guards on the elaborately-carved dark wood arms of the plush chairs, the base and adjustment tips on a meter-wide blue-green electronic globe, a thin scattering of crystalline green among the silver glitter in the ceiling. Malachite and kryptonite bookends. Not even enough to affect a color scheme, really.
Not enough to cripple him, any more, much less kill him, after all the years of forced acclimatization to exposure. He'd grown more resistant as his cells toughened with age. Just enough to make him tired, and dizzy, and low-grade ill. As if talking to Lex wasn't enough to do that all by itself.
At least Lex no longer wore that hideous green and gold ring with its matching tie tack and cufflink set. (Clark sometimes wondered if even their society page editor were in on the 'don't-tell-Clark, but-those-glasses, oh please' joke. Her delicately disapproving column regarding the billionaire's "unfortunate taste in, mm, less than the expected quality of gemstones in his accouterments, which, we are sorry to have to report, do not greatly complement Mr. Luthor's normally impeccably regal attire" had appeared the morning after a charity-cum-awards dinner at which Clark's prolonged enforced proximity to Lex's "faux emeralds" had made him so sick that even a rival reporter had worriedly offered to drive him home.)
Whatever vicious pleasure Lex had gotten out of seeing Clark sweat, in more ways than one, had been neatly trumped by a little catty public needling whose very pettiness was humiliating. Clark didn't know what had become of the deadly jewelry set, but Lex, as if content with having made his point, had never worn it again, even when no society editors were present.
What were you trying to prove, Lex? That you know exactly how much of the stuff I can tolerate without surrendering? But I would have expected you to know. Dammit, Lex, once, I would even have shown you. I would have trusted you with that weapon -- and unlike Bruce, I would never have dreamed that you would actually use it.
Or was that just for spite? Is that all that's left between us?
Clark watched Lex wander over to the globe and gaze down at it pensively, as if considering his domain. It was, Clark knew, just another move calculated to annoy him -- Lex's claiming of Earth for his own, a world to which Kal-El would forever be alien, outsider. A statement that, regardless of accolades, he didn't belong here. Superman had no home.
Clark sighed, worn out before the first words were spoken, the first thrust offered and parried. "Were you trying to get my attention, Lex, or just experimenting with a new way to repel small animals?" Why won't you just pick up the phone? Just say you wanted to talk? You have to know I would still answer, would be there if you asked me to.
"Superman," Lex acknowledged finally. A very slight sneer, not much more condescending than his old smirk. A hint of clearly falsified surprise, an impression of thorough boredom. So carefully tailored and controlled. Lionel's brutal lessons turned against the one person he had wanted never to use them on. "To what do I owe the," a calculated look up and down, just short of disgust, "honor?"
I hate you, Superman. I hate what you've done to Clark. I hate that stupid outfit, that makes you look so untouchable and unreal. I hate seeing you break all the rules of nature like that, emphasizing your not-human-ness.
Clark would have at least used the elevator.
Clark would have been wearing something old and sloppy and comfortable. Clark would have come to my home to talk, maybe even chastise, but not to my office to grandstand. Clark might have been angry, or accusing, or disappointed, or resigned -- but Clark would never be so cold. So aloof. So ... Superman.
Clark held Lex's gaze through the window for a long minute, then shook his head. "If you just want to annoy me, could you please do it without tormenting every dog and cat in the city? I know you don't care about people, but it's not like you to stoop to abusing animals for the plain cruelty of it." That was a low blow, Clark knew.
Lex had not been permitted to have pets, since Lionel considered such sentimentality a weakness, but Lex despised anyone so petty as to need to bolster their ego at the expense of the helpless innocent. Clark's blatant implication to the contrary was so crude that Lex was almost embarrassed for him.
He turned away from the window with a slight shrug. "I have no further interest in it. Do whatever you want. You know where the controls are."
The same old game, the same old dare. Clark's lips thinned. One of these days, he was going to respond in kind, and slag that window, and the control panel, and everything else contaminated green. Some day. But it would have to be a day when he was certain he was doing it out of calm rational necessity, a logical decision without a hint of emotion.
No trace of anger, or retaliation, or even frustration could ever be permitted to drive any such act of wanton destruction. Bad enough to catch always the glimpse of fear, the ever so slight hitch of breath and increase in heart rate, from everyone he so much as shook hands with.
Even his parents, for all their protestations otherwise, and the unconditional love he hadn't really ever doubted (even drugged on red), could never help reacting like, well, like human beings, in the presence of overwhelmingly superior raw power. Instinctive fear. Like facing an armed atomic bomb.
Lex was the only one who seemed to have mastered that reflex, who had never been at all afraid of Clark. His office was decorated with kryptonite accents as a taunt, not as a threat. He appeared, at least, to feel no need for protection from Clark.
Clark was unwilling to risk any impulse that might replace even the anger deep in Lex's eyes with so much as a molecule of buried but ineradicable fear.
"All right," Clark said softly. A blur -- moving at the speeds his half-million-times-faster synapses made possible was as easy and natural for him as matching human-normal reaction time, not even requiring conscious decision, any more -- and Clark was inside, at the control panel. (Not even Luthor's contempt for rules extended to violating safety codes for fire escapes.) He tapped out the clear-all sequence on the elegantly understated keypad carefully, increasingly-burning fingertips precise and deliberate (he'd found out the hard way that the command would abort, and he'd have to do it all over again, if it were entered too quickly), on each brushed-silver touch plate, numbered and limned in dimly phosphorescent meteoritic green.
The stabbing scream in his ears cut off. He shifted his attention to keeping his face impassive and his legs steady as the thin waves of poison washed over him, scorching inside and fever-cold in his skin, draining his strength and life, twisting both senses and gut. His autonomic control faltered; he couldn't prevent his skin from paling nor a sheen of sweat from popping out, but a slow steady breath brought his biofeedback training up, rerouting the protests of pain to a mental holding area, compensating like an experienced drunk for the tilt-a-whirl in his balance as he turned.
Lex was watching, of course. Even when he studiously seemed to be ignoring Clark, he was always watching. Clark had even seen Lex replaying the security recordings of the times when he'd had Clark at this particular disadvantage, replaying them over and over, in fact -- multiple angles, slow motion, close-up and detail-enhanced, as if looking for something, searching for some elusive clue.
It was both fascinating and repulsive to watch himself being examined that way. He didn't do it very often. Watching Lex was a guilty enough feeling all by itself.
Through the slowly increasing dizziness and deteriorating-towards-human vision, he was struck, as always, by the unexpectedness of Lex's expression. Not the nearly habitual smirk. Not, as almost everyone would have bet money on, any indication of triumph, no matter how sardonic. No hint of satisfaction. Lex's faint frown at the globe was deliberately distracted, as if puzzling out an abstract problem elsewhere -- and ever so slightly, though Clark couldn't be sure with his grasp on exterior perceptions slipping, disappointed. Unhappy, even. Like a man with regrets.
Someday, Clark thought carefully, struggling to keep his mind on the inevitable intricacies of any confrontation with Lex, instead of on the increasing unpleasant certainty that he was going to lose his dinner, someday I'm just going to leave it at this. Turn around and walk away from him and his games, once and for all. Someday I'll learn to stop hoping for an actual conversation, much less an explanation. Someday I'll just go home and pass out in peace for awhile. Lose myself in wandering around the world for awhile. Work on my book without wondering if this is what a migraine is like. Someday, I'm going to quit even bothering to ask.
And then Lex won't mean anything more to me that what he obviously wants to, any more.
Someday I'm just going to give up. But not -- quite -- yet.
"What do you want, Lex?" The effort it took to keep his voice calm and steady, to not betray the strain, robbed it of its customary resonance. Clark didn't much care. If weakness and imperfection in the superhuman icon disappointed Lex, he could just damn well quit decorating with all that freaking green. It wasn't as if he were overly fond of the color, after all. He certainly didn't keep any around in his own private interior penthouse quarters at the top of the building.
(Clark had accidentally tuned in on Lex at home -- Lex's Lair, he'd dubbed it -- once, out of sheer astonishment at finding the windowless and steel-shuttered-skylight venue utterly unshielded to x-ray vision. His obvious desire for privacy and security could not possibly have been compromised accidentally. Perhaps an incompetent contractor? It wasn't as if Lex went around x-raying his own walls...
The almost casual living space contrasted jarringly from the habitats Clark was used to seeing Lex in -- none of the austere elegance of the old castle, the sterile intimidating power of the offices. Paradoxically, Lex had seemed most out-of-place in the familiarity of his own personal abode, as if he were, as he once said of the castle, just haunting it -- a lonely and restless ghost amid the half-read books and vague disarray, an incomplete Lex who had tried to make a comfort zone with rumpled spreads, and by wearing lay-around clothes, only to find that he could not touch the trappings of comfort, nor they him.
Clark had fled, mortified, from the sight of that somehow helpless Lex, and never looked back. Only later had his memory supplied him with the puzzling detail that the floor between the penthouse and the office had been impervious to x-ray, and unlike the office below, there was not so much as a flake in a plastic paperweight's worth of meteor rock anywhere in any of the top floor penthouse rooms.)
Lex turned to Clark now, and it seemed, almost, through the green haze increasingly fogging his mind, that there was something of that not-quite-all-there Lex again, someone out of place and uncomfortable enough to be weighing the possibility of a direct and meaningful answer to that question. Absurd, of course. Clark resisted the reflexive impulse to shake his head, knowing from experience that all he would achieve was a compounded case of vertigo. Trying to stay focused on Lex as he slowly circled Clark, as if in consideration, was already adding insult to cumulative-poisoning injury as far as his queasy stomach and uncertain inner ear were concerned.
"What do I want?" Lex repeated expressionlessly, a flat downward inflection making it a question in sentence structure only. Isn't that obvious, alien? I want everything -- anything -- except you. I want my world, my life, reserved for those of us who belong here. I want my friend back. You, I want to go away and leave me alone.
I'd think you'd take the hint by now, instead of standing there waiting until I have to drag you out the fire escape and throw you off the building just to get you out of range. Maybe next time I'll lace the carpet with kryptonite, too, if that's what it takes to get you to hurry up and get to the point.
If even that works. Clark was always kind of dense about looking out for himself. Everyone else, but not himself.
But you're not Clark.
Lex knew to the microgram how much kryptonite Clark could tolerate, and for how long -- the farmboy was inexcusably careless, for an alien, about leaving dead skin cells on everything he touched. The only thing that had kept Lex from a gleeful experiment in resurrecting a DNAlien was the perfectly understandable abhorrence about unleashing something with Kal-El's power and none of the Kent's conscience.
Another piece of knowledge he could have made a fortune with -- and had thrown away, buried completely and without a trace, because it was -- well, it was Clark.
(He also knew to the microgram how much of the mutagenic radiation he, or any other Earth-native, could withstand without deleterious effects. He was a krypto-mutant himself, and therefore heavy on the tolerant side, but that damn ring must have been a hell of a lot more poisonous than average -- though not as vicious as Lana's little necklace crystal, that could incapacitate Clark from ten feet away.
Then again, Lana had been only three when she was mutated in the skyfall, much more resilient and changeable than a prepubescent boy. She was also a hell of a lot more dangerous than Tina Greer, who only changed physical shape. Lana could make anyone see, and feel, whatever she wanted them to see, and whatever her subconscious decided they should feel -- a subconscious characteristic which was not always a survival trait, when she wanted to be adored, and the crazies obligingly came out to stalk her.
Lex sometimes wondered if Clark ever suspected, to this day, what Lana really was. She'd worn that necklace a lot longer than he'd worn his toy ring.)
"What makes you think I want anything at all from you?" The sneer shifted, just a trace, but enough to reveal underlying anger. "I doubt that you've come to offer to compensate me for ruining yet another research project."
Clark sighed. Had Lex always been so blatantly bottom-line? It was getting harder to remember. "Your research project was using humans as guinea pigs, Lex." His voice sounded scratchy, whether from kryptonite poisoning or abhorrence at the idea, he didn't know, and presently didn't care.
The trite cliched phrase made the scientific stickler for accuracy in Lex bristle. "My test subjects," he emphasized coolly, "are informed volunteers. They knew the risks before they undertook any experiments. In addition, not that you care, they were all terminal patients with nothing left to lose. Your interference cost them a chance at extending their lives." Lex coated the sarcasm with an almost burlesque drawl. "Or is the right to decide what to do with our own lives just another one of those pursuits that we mere humans can't be trusted with?"
"If you don't think we should be allowed to choose our own fates, Superman, then why don't you go ahead and take over the world?" Lex had seen that accusation make Clark flinch many times before, a twisting pain that obviously struck him deeper than the physical torment. That particular knife, Lex was willing to keep probing with until Clark told him to stop, and why. "Or is it only me that provokes such particular personal prying and meddling from the self-proclaimed defender of truth and justice? Perhaps the hero is not quite so blatant about violating his principles about respecting our privacy, except with those towards whom he was so adamantly unforgiving for the same practice?"
Clark would have closed his eyes against the bitterness in Lex's accusation, except for the nagging certainty that he wouldn't have been able to stay upright if he did. The room was swaying badly enough already without losing his visual horizon as well.
He was fairly sure there was a hole in Lex's paralleling logic somewhere, that somehow put Clark in the wrong in both cases, but clear and careful reasoning was long past him. Not that he'd ever been able to keep up with Lex at the best of times. He only knew, between the pounding in his head and the weakness that made him want to crawl away and curl up in a corner somewhere, that Lex was as angry at him for "prying," as Lex put it, as Clark had ever been at Lex for snooping into Clark's secrets.
As if interfering with other people's lives were Lex's province alone, and anyone else interfering was intruding on his divine right. On the other hand, it could be read as Lex genuinely not understanding why anyone should object to a pursuit of knowledge.
He had long since realized, himself, that asking Lex not to be curious, to accept anomalies without questioning, was as futile as asking a hunting cat not to hunt. He knew now that the "Clark room" had been neither shrine nor lab, only a collection, a museum of mysteries, as harmless (and potentially harmful) as -- and far less public than -- Chloe's Wall of Weird.
He wished he could explain the insecurity and panic that had driven a teenager to lash out at what he perceived as betrayal of their tacit agreement. Clark knew now that he hadn't been entirely sane himself growing up, paranoid beyond all reason from his lifelong conditioning, and yet careless to the point of rebellion, as if subconsciously wishing to be caught. He could have saved them both a lot of grief if he could just had brought himself to trust Lex, to understand that Pete's reaction was peculiar to his own family background (Judge Ross considered that concealing any important information from her was a first degree felony) and not the kind of rejection he might universally expect.
(Chloe hadn't freaked -- when he finally came clean to her, she had all but patted him on the head like a puppy confessing with his tail between his legs for piddling on the carpet -- but to this day she wouldn't tell him when she had first found out, and what her reaction had been. He would never know whether or not he had come close to losing her as a friend, whether it be over the not-human part or over the years of lies.)
But he also wished that Lex had been content to simply accept the Clark that he knew, instead of always demanding that he be more than he was, expecting more of Clark than he was willing or able to give.
He was almost tempted, once again, to be angry with Lex for taunting him with the mantle of dictator-wanna-be. Of all the things to accuse me of...! I blew up my own ship to keep from being forced to do just that! But Lex didn't know about that particular internal struggle, and now it was too late for him to expect Lex to believe it if he did try to explain.
Besides, being angry would have taken more energy than he had to spare. And trying to figure out Lex's twists and turns in logical justifications always made him dizzy, which he definitely did not need more of right now.
He wished sometimes that he had dared to confide in Lex about the terrible legacy that Jor-El had tried to program him to follow. Lex knew all about the impersonal psychological cruelty of a domineering father's expectations. Lex might have been the best of all possible choices in helping him deal with that awful weight.
But knowing that would just have given you more reason to distrust and oppose me, wouldn't it, Lex? Would you ever have believed that I've spent every day since I found out that part of the truth about myself, fighting against it? Fighting, denying, what my sire, what my whole destroyed world, demanded that I do?
You didn't want to become like your father. Only you can say whether you succeeded or not. But I had the cross of not just my father but a whole lost planet to bear, and a whole adopted world trusting me not to follow that plan -- a whole world to sit in horrified judgment on me if I ever gave into that demand.
How could I have told you about that, Lex? You wouldn't believe me about anything else. If I had tried to tell you just how completely wrong you are about what I want, and try, to be and to do, you'd laugh at me.
Or call me a liar. Or maybe just put a green glowing bullet in me and be done with it.
How can I get you to understand that I never asked for this? That every day of my life is a balancing act, with unimaginable danger to everyone and everything on if my control ever slips?
I can't even get you to understand how wrong it is for you to treat other human beings the way you do.
"Did -- did your -- 'test subjects' ... " He struggled against the encroaching lethal green fog to keep focused on the present issue, the plain facts that had so horrified him when he first read about Lex's studies. "... know that there hadn't been any other trials? Any previous successes?" He couldn't afford to lose sight of his primary objection, how cavalierly Lex was using people's lives, just because he could barely see anything at all through the green. "You had ... had them stop ... using conventional treatments. Did they really know wh ... what a long shot ... you were making them take?"
Not the most eloquent protest he'd ever lodged, but it would have to do. There didn't seem to be enough air in the room.
Lex regarded him icily, but emotion blazed just beneath the frozen surface. Would you look at yourself? Listen to yourself? Of all the people to talk about taking long shots! Or do you not even see yourself as Clark when you look in the mirror, any more? Is the costume all that's left of you? "Jonathan Kent," he said finally, with deadly quiet, "Would have taken such a long shot."
The words went through him like a fresh wave of radioactive poison, a tidal force battering down the last wall of his defenses. He flinched, closing his eyes automatically in concentration, fighting to brace himself. Mistake. Light and dark swirled around him. Lex, the room, everything seemed to recede, except the wrenching pain that was only partly physical.
He had to get away, now. Had to, it was all over. Lex had him cold with that one. Lex would have won even if Clark had held every other advantage. Because Jonathan had indeed taken that kind of risk, and more, over and over, from the first day he found an alien toddler and a crashed spacecraft, and chosen to put his own life on the line to save and protect that alien child and give him the chance to grow up to live a life of his own.
"That's n-not ... the s-same thing." Because dad sacrificed everything that he did for my sake. Not his own. The rest of the world can't even imagine how much they owe mom and dad for their selflessness. I hope the rest of the world never has to. "Whatever ... choices ... dad made ... n-no one ... ever made him ... f-false promises."
Lex's hand came down flat on his desk, a sharp crack of anger and frustration that he displayed even less often than Lionel ever had. He was too mad even to note or be startled at Superman's reference to "dad." The icon in the suit was never that informal.
"I made no false promises! My test subjects believed it to be an honor to be pioneers! They're volunteers, like any other early explorers at the vanguard of new discoveries. Of course they knew they were doing something unprecedented. They chose to accept that."
Really, Lex? Would you have taken such risks, personally? You haven't ever actually put anything of yourself on the line. Not like dad did. It's always been about the money and power and fame -- the control -- that your discoveries and inventions give you. No matter what it costs anyone else. "The government ... d-didn't ... think so."
"The government," Lex sneered. Caught up in his argument, he stepped towards Clark challengingly, eyes blazing. "Now there's quite a change in attitude. Now the government knows best? I suppose you've decided to trust the government enough these days to let them experiment on you?"
The words alone staggered Clark. Surely he had nothing to fear from the government any more. He was a hero, a symbol of all that the world honored most. He was safe from that old nightmare, at least. Wasn't he? And yet...
The fear, the phobia of being confined, of being studied, still ran deep.
Am I really such a hypocrite?
Lex stood frozen, hand half-raised in a gesture he had not intended to make, his argument forgotten. I did not just say that. I did not just say that to Clark.
To Superman, yes. But not to Clark. Never to Clark. To suggest, to even think of Clark being locked up and experimented on... Edge of green scalpel against Clark's skin, Clark's flesh crawling, small sounds of terror as well as pain... No. No. No.
"If it would ... s-serve any ... purpose," Clark said finally, the normally deep authoritarian voice strengthless, "M-maybe ... I would. But..."
Lex waited for him to finish his objection, ready to pounce. "But what, Clark?" he finally prodded, not even noticing the change in his own voice, the use of the name. "Only on your terms? Only if it's your choice? That's no different from what I'm offering to others now, is it?"
Lex caught himself, remembering then who he was arguing with, and why. It was hard. The pale man in front of him didn't look a bit like Superman, costume be damned. He looked like Clark, the selfless child he'd known so well, struggling even though he knew he was losing, never giving up.
Lex made himself harden his voice. "Are you denying us the choice of taking a chance you would yourself? How very superior of you. How very alien chauvinist."
Clark swayed, barely catching himself. "Matter of ... acceptable ... risk."
Because you'd still believe you have some control over it? Even you aren't that naïve. And besides, I don't believe for a minute that you yourself would limit it to "acceptable risk," if you even knew what that meant.
Jonathan didn't. Superman doesn't. And neither did the boy who once dared to make friends with a Luthor.
"Then Kal-El is a fool," Lex said harshly. Made himself say. "Humanity is in far less danger from me than you are from humanity."
And that was a low blow, because Lex knew about Clark's one paranoia -- that a whole world could turn on him, if he made one mistake, leaving him with no home at all.
"Because ... I can't ever ... take the chance ... of being wrong. So wrong." Clark turned, carefully, making his way on unsteady legs and through foggy vision back to the stairwell. "So much power ... can't ever afford ... to be wrong."
Lex wasn't even tempted to laugh at the irony of someone who could barely stand upright talking about power. He knew exactly what Clark -- Kal-El -- was talking about, because he knew that kind of power on a daily basis himself. The power of life and death in your hands. At your whim. At the slightest mistake. At an angry word, a touch of a button, a misplaced comma in a document signed without looking. Or caring.
And Kal-El's -- Clark's -- power was almost immeasurably greater than his.
The difference between them was, that Lex did not fear the consequences of his mistakes. He accepted them. Whatever they cost him personally, whatever they cost humanity, he was willing to take that responsibility.
Because that was the price you paid for being human.
Anything worth being achieved was worth the risk of making mistakes in the pursuit. Human pioneers had given their lives, had sent others to their deaths, since before the discovery of how to make fire. Technology could be a terrible master -- but it was also the difference between the most dangerous species on the planet and the ones who had been gifted by evolution with merely the talent to survive. There were faster animals, stronger, more poisonous, more lethal -- but only humans had that kind of power over everything.
Kal-El was stronger, faster, more lethal than anything on the planet -- but humans could destroy him. Mentally, as well, as physically.
Because Kal-El wasn't Clark. Wasn't willing to push the boundaries, take the risks, reach beyond his grasp. Wasn't human.
Somehow, Lex was not quite so proud of that as he thought he ought to be.
"And that," Lex said in his deadly level trained voice, "is why you'll always lose, alien."
Clark managed to turn to face him, balancing against the wall with one hand, the other held out a little, maybe in a kind of supplication, maybe just to steady himself. "L-losing ... isn't .. s-so bad ... sometimes..."
Winning is so easy. So empty. Like playing football against people who can't even imagine what I can see, how fast I can move, how careful I have to be not to hurt them just by touching them. I think I'd be grateful to lose, honestly and for real, once in awhile. Maybe that's why I play this stupid game with Lex. He's the only one who has even the slightest chance of winning against me.
The only thing I fear losing is having a home here. And no one born on this planet can understand that.
Lex's eyes narrowed. "No wonder," he all but spat, "you wear that stupid costume and keep yourself so distant. No one human would ever say anything like that."
Low blow, and not entirely true -- Clark Kent passed for human fairly well, to the extent of being able to write in human words about human conditions effectively enough to earn awards from his professional peers. But Lex knew he was striking more deeply than that, and saw it in Clark's flinch. He would stand there and let himself be poisoned by the lethal radiation, but he would shrink from facing the simple fact of his inhumanity.
"No one ... h-human ... s-seems ... to care..." About how easily you could lose everything, about how fragile you are, about how much you hurt each other, about the damage your carelessness and self-centeredness inflicts on this most precious and wonderful of worlds. About your home. "Ab-bout ... being ... wrong."
Clark stumbled into the firewell stairs that he'd flashed through so few minutes and so many words ago, and paused to catch his breath, holding onto the railing and struggling not to throw up. The "exit" sign glowed an ominous green. Fine. There was no way he could manage the one flight to the roof, but he could always fall down a few levels until he was mostly out of range, and if Luthor wanted to watch security videos of Superman tumbling on his butt down the stairs, well, that was better than leaving vomit for him to analyze. Clark dropped to his knees on the first step and let gravity do the rest.
He did manage not to puke during the joyride, but just barely.
An uncountable ten minutes or so later, Clark felt recovered enough to try standing up again, and felt tentatively within himself for the strength to fly. Maybe, he decided, so long as he didn't have to keep to a straight line. Hopefully Metropolis International wasn't keeping a doppler radar on him.
Did we ever just talk, Lex? All I can remember now is the arguments, the accusations, the evasions. I do not hold myself blameless -- but I was a kid, and I was scared. But then, you weren't much more than a teenager yourself, and you didn't exactly have a normal upbringing, either, and I didn't know enough to make allowances for what you'd been through, and what you'd had to learn to do, the threats you had to anticipate, just to protect yourself. Now both of us are more secure, we know who we are, yet all we do is oppose one another. We don't even agree on what the words mean, any more. Will we ever so much as try to understand where the other one is coming from? Will we ever be able to ... just ... talk?
He did not look back at Lex's building.
He did not see Lex climb the stairs to his home, such as he'd tried to make it -- the quilt Martha had once given him crumpled on the couch in front of the unlit fire, logs interspersed with the bits and pieces of dead appletree wood for scent that Jonathan Kent collected by hand and sold over the internet for pocket change. He did not see Lex finger the telescope -- also sold, once Clark had left the farm behind -- useless for tracking a flying man, but Lex still looked through it anyway, sometimes, and not at the stars.
He did not waste his still-precarious balance of energy trying to tune in on Lex. They had said all they had to say to each other for this round. If Lex turned on that !#$! ultrasonic again, he was going to fly up into space and soak up enough energy to slag it from orbit, anger management be damned. Right now, he doubted he could set a piece of paper on fire, and he just wanted to sleep.
He did not see Lex staring out through the unshielded window -- plain glass with no lead in it at all -- in the direction of his apartment. Even at full power, he probably would not have heard Lex's whisper.
"But you are wrong, Clark. And I did lose."