Title: Night Terrors
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Clark/Lex
Rating: PG (Language)
Warnings: Spoilers (slight) for some season one. Adult themes.
Summary: Lex is afraid of monsters, and it's driving him insane.
Lex doesn't know what it's like to be insane. It's not a concept he can comprehend, and no matter how far he pushes himself, he knows that he'll never fall, never reach that point where intellect separates from self. Even at his worst he feels like it's all pretend.
Madness is a game to him, and like all games he knows it's a construct, a thing that is created, unnatural. And Lex knows all about games.
He's drunk. The scotch is good, very good. He knows better than to comment on it's age, because, unlike wine, scotch doesn't get better with age –doesn't change, doesn't mature, doesn't need to and oh god he's perfect…-. It's an immediate drink, and that's what he likes about it. Amber liquid sloshes. His tumbler is diamond cut and he feels the ridges with his finders. The ice has long since dissolved and the glass is warm. He tries to recapture his train of thought.
Madness. Yes. He thinks madness is a blessing, that it dissolves all guilt, all responsibility. In his eyes madness is where there truly are no consequences. Zero.
His tie has long since been abandoned. His suit jacket is lying on the floor somewhere and his shirt, his favourite, lavender, shirt is unbuttoned to the throat and maybe a little lower, because he didn't know when to stop.
Lex Luthor grins at that. Luthors are known for their control, but he wonders if any of them really knew how to stop. Control, yes, restrain, not so much.
He has been a fucking saint.
"A fucking saint!" he yells, but the castle is empty and in the end he's just yelling at himself. Talking to oneself, a symptom of madness. Symptoms can be faked.
The bottle is nowhere near empty. If he drunk enough then he could fake it, pretend that he was crazy. Batshit insane. But you weren't crazy if you thought you were, and this simple statement, picked up fuck knows where, is so ingrained that not even the harshest liquors could make him forget.
He stars at the glass again, at the honey-gold liquid. He doesn't drink his scotch neat, preferring to mix it with water, to break it's spirit. It's better than cola, barely more dignified, but he is drinking alone and fucked if anyone else was going to tell him to drink it straight, like man.
Man. Monster. Lex relaxes into the leather armchair and watched the glass tile, watches the liquid spill in slow motion, knowing that by turning his hand he could prevent a mess, and still not gathering the…whatever… to prevent the inevitable. He could clean the spot, he knows it will stain, but that's what servants are for. Someone else would clean it tomorrow.
His father would tell him to clean his own mess. Lex usually preferred to prevent them.
Amber liquid sloshes. He could have chosen the wine, but he wanted to avoid anything with an age. Time, for now, was against him. Drinking scotch alone, it made him feel too old and too young at the same time.
He puts the glass on the table with too much care and fumbled with his belt. Suit pants, and suddenly he hates them, irrational and fevered and he can't stand them because he is still young, damn it, and he shouldn't be wearing a suit at all. Sometimes he forgets that people his age are only just starting to go to clubs, to fuck and fight and drink and all the things he's already done, all the things he's supposed to be past.
At the time he thought he was rebelling, thought he was proving to his father that he'd never grow up, never be like him and now, at twenty-two he is the old man in a suit with a business to run.
He wonders if that's how they see him, some pathetic old guy trying to reconnect with his youth, or do they see a young man still? Would someone else his age appear younger?
Lex drinks straight from the bottle and it makes him gag. Seven years ago he could have taken it, hell, he'd done far worse than booze by then, but somewhere along the line his body had grown up on him. Old. Weak. It made sense if he wanted what they had.
Why else would he embroil himself in their adolescent drama.
"I don't want to be him," he said, not realising it was true until the words came out. The drama that had been so real to the boy –special boy, darling boy- was absurd. Melodramatic. Immature.
Lex snickered. Sometimes the time he spent around Smallville's youth reminded him of his father, his games and his…theatrics. What would Lionel do?
Lionel might have just taken what was so clearly on offer, but then. Lex was often surprised at his father's own sense of morality. Enough of the world thought the man was a monster, but Lex knew that the old man had, if not a soul, but some semblance of a code, albeit only one that he knew or followed.
Lionel never touched him.
Lex spent so much time proving to others, to himself, that he wasn't Lionel. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he pushed himself into being another kind of monster altogether.
He wedged the bottle between his legs and it jutted out like and obscene glass erection. It was enough to make him consider smashing it. The thought of which was enough to make him laugh.
If only he could break himself, cut off some part that would, like cutting out a cancer, take this thing, this feeling from him.
Like a cancer, he assumed, there's be too much risk of stray cells being left behind.
He could cut off his cock, but he was pretty sure the infection had spread further, into his heart and into his brain.
Sometimes he wondered it the tumour that needed to be cut existed outside his body, in the form of an unnatural boy.
No, there was some part, some small, traitorous part that insisted there was nothing wrong with Clark Kent. It was the same part that stopped him testing his theories. After all, if there was noting wrong,different,strange special, about Clark Kent, then the problem was all his.
Maybe it wasn't on offer after all. Maybe it was just him. Maybe he was a monster.
The boy was too young. Lex was too old.
Maybe he was mad after all.