"Sorry about that," Lex said as he walked into the room. She had heard him coming, but continued to sit on the couch in thought.
She looked towards him. The stained glass windows were casting red light onto his scalp. After a short moment she smiled faintly and said, "I understand."
"What?" he asked when he noticed the way she looked at him and the delay of her response. He walked over to the couch she was sitting on.
She didn't want to mention that she was pondering his private phone conversation and then was temporarily paralyzed by his beauty. You did not just think that, she told herself. It was just an interesting effect of colored light and shadow that any person of the arts would have found appealing. Right? Of course.
"I was just thinking about how hard it'll be to train someone to do that guy's job," she said lightly. It was true, natural abilities like the ones they looked for weren't apparent in just anyone. They had to search for new people from all walks of life. It was strenuous. They usually had someone looking all the time, even when they didn't need anyone. And then there was the training time that had to be invested in a new soldier before they could be left on their own to train as they saw fit… It took a quite some time to attain a fully functional unit – soldier.
Lex couldn't read her well enough to know if she was just thinking about it or if she was stressing about it. How horrible could this be? Find another paper pusher. "It's only work," he said as he sat on the other end of the couch. He wished her artist's tube wasn't where it was so he could have sat closer to her. Maybe he would be able to figure out what she smelled like. It had been bothering him since last night. Something was familiar about it, despite its unusual nature.
Only work. My work is my whole life, she thought. And now there was a bitter, not to mention well-connected, trained killer out there. People had certainly retired before, but none with the aggression that Gell had. Usually people even remotely like him self-destructed, crashed and burned before they could retire. He had been a member of the team for longer than she had, but she never liked the man. Something in her always told her not to trust him. Not to mention the way that he treated her before she was EX-O…
She nodded. "I saw it coming. He was showing up to work less and less. He was – increasingly insubordinate, to put it mildly," she said more to herself than to Lex. Gell had developed an even greater distrust and hate of her ever since she returned from "The Paris Incident," which her eight-month disappearance had become known as. It was accurate, the incident at the Louver had started – her change. Maybe he was just angry because she had so easily returned to being EX-O and he felt he had been cheated again. Maybe her new behavior just disturbed him that much. Or it could stem from his previous attempts to – attain her. No, she was a lot of things, but desirable was not one of them.
She didn't want to talk about it anymore. Even though she wasn't really lying, the context was misleading. She didn't like thinking about Gell or the way she had to lie to everyone about having selective amnesia from when she was missing in action either. "Compared to the last one, that was a short conversation with your father," she commented to change the subject.
"He wanted me to attend an art exhibit opening in Metropolis the first week of November," he started, "Maybe something you would enjoy." Lex figured his father was probably already running a more thorough background check on her. He wasn't stupid. He really had wanted to keep her – beneath his father's radar.
He was offering her an invitation, she knew. She couldn't help but smile; her rubbing elbows with high society, her wearing a dress. She would have laughed if he didn't look so serious about the invitation. "I'm busy that night," she said as though she had had plans from months before.
He smiled at her, "I didn't even tell you what day it was on."
"I'll be gone the first week in November," she recovered. She couldn't continue to have a personal relationship with him after she left. She liked him; they had a lot in common and she had fun with him, but he would ask questions. She knew he would, that was one of the reasons she liked him.
"Oh," he said with sigh. Maybe she would be gone that week, but she answered pretty quickly. He didn't understand, he thought they had a great time together. At least he had a good time when he was with her. She had never said anything but he wondered if it could be that… He ran a hand over his scalp. Was he – self-conscious? He told people that he thought his head was a gift and that it defined him and it was true, but he had a – slight complex around people that he genuinely cared about impressing.
"I told you that the people in our office are very busy, in high demand," she said as she picked up her artist's tube and set it beside the couch. She didn't want him to touch it and hurt himself. "We are away often," she continued. She wished that she could tell him the truth.
He turned toward her, "Well, if you find that you are free…"
Should she just come clean about the other obvious reasons she couldn't go with him? She turned to face him and put her arm on the back of the couch. "I'm not exactly the kind of person you take to something like that," she said with honesty in her eyes.
"And why is that?" he asked in a disbelieving tone.
She had been trained to be bait when she arrived at the base, when she was first recruited. All the women were, not that there were many women that were recruited. She had been trained by the best. An image of Thalia flashed in her memory, the woman was a living pheromone. None of her targets had ever resisted her. It was a shame that she was lost before Rhone could really get to know her. Now Rhone was the only woman on the team.
Thalia taught her to look at someone and determine what he or she wanted you to be. Then change yourself to become it. She used it on men to attain information with astounding success. Rhone had never had to do it, and she never wanted to. She didn't like the idea of becoming some kind of object, even if it was only a temporary fraud. Not only that, Thalia was beautiful – would it even work if Rhone tried it? Sure, she used it to gain the good graces of many but as a form of recon?
"Can you imagine what your peers would think if you showed up with some no-makeup, poorly dressed, ill refined, plain, comic book drawing nobody?" she chuckled. The thought of her crashing some high society art exhibit on a skateboard was amusing to her, like a bad eighties movie.
Lex wasn't laughing and he wasn't smiling. He sat there for a moment looking at her. He shook his head partly because he didn't know how to respond to that and because he didn't give a shit about what anyone else thought. If they had any intelligence at all, they would see at least part of what he saw in her. But that would mean that they would have to look up from the inevitable contest of "Who Has the Most Money" for a few minutes.
She hadn't noticed his reaction. "If your father found out that you disgraced your name in such a way, he might find an even shittier town to banish you to. Maybe a leper colony or someplace equally appealing," she was still amused. After a moment, she realized his reaction and her smile faded, "What?"
"I invited you," his eyes flashed, "and I meant it."
"I – didn't mean to offend you, Mr. Luthor. I'm sorry," she said.
"You didn't offend me," he relaxed a little bit, "just say that you'll go."
"I told you that I can't," she replied and tried to make it sound believable. It was better this way and she hated it. It was possible that she really would be gone those days. She never knew when a job would come up.
She wasn't lying, but she was hiding something. He got that feeling from her a lot. What could someone like her possibly have to hide? Was he just paranoid? He often found himself feeling that many people were hiding things from him – even Clark. And that was just ridiculous.
Could it be the whole situation would just be uncomfortable to her? Rich people, expensive clothes, networking, even he felt a little overwhelmed at times, and he was raised to deal with that kind of situation. That was a pretty good explanation. If that was the case, he had to admit that he admired her foresight.
She could see that he was thinking about what had just been said. He must not get rejected that often, she thought looking at him. Ok, he must not ever get rejected. Hell, I bet he never even has to ask. "Maybe some other time," she said. What, some other time? That was just as impossible.
She would have to remember to look in on the exhibit if she was around Metropolis. There would be a lot of high power people there, maybe doing something suspicious. It was fascinating what you could trace back to certain "pillars of the community."
He nodded slowly. Well, that was something. Maybe he could convince her to cancel any plans she had for the week of the art exhibit before she left. …There was that feeling again, that ache he had felt when he thought about her leaving.
"Why the library?" she roused him from his thoughts.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Of all the rooms in this museum, why did you tell me to go to the library?" she clarified her question. She gestured to her surroundings as she looked at them.
He paused for a moment as he looked around the room and considered her question. "I just thought you would like it in here. I almost expected you to be looking through my collection," he said.
"Why would you think that?" she asked with a quizzical look on her face.
"You just seem like you would be interested in reading more than comic books," he said with a smirk.
She knew that he was trying to compliment her in a subtle way. She smiled widely and leaned towards him slightly, "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong all the time, Mr. Luthor?"
His smile widened and he let out a small laugh.
"If this were a few years ago, you would have been right though," she conceded.
The expression on his face returned to the trademark smirk. He tilted his head in a tell-me-more gesture. He silently debated moving over another cushion or two, to sit right beside her.
"They just stopped speaking to me," she gestured to the shelves of countless great authors again.
"They stopped 'speaking' to you?" he asked using her words.
She decided to share something of herself. It was something from far enough back that it didn't really matter. It was part of her old life. "When I was still in high school…" she started, "stop me if you think you are going to fall into a boredom-induced coma."
His eyes didn't leave her as he continued to smirk, "I'll let you know."
"I did this speech on art and beauty," she added, "it was a philosophy course." Lex nodded. "I concluded that something was only art and beautiful if you could see either a part or all of yourself in it – the innate vanity of humanity. To make a long story short, sometime later I realized that I couldn't see myself in those anymore," she gestured to the shelves once more, "They didn't 'speak' to me anymore."
"So, what happened to make you realize that?" Lex asked.
Why did he always have to ask those kinds of questions? He asked questions that could lead the conversation towards more – prohibited subjects. "I used to work at that comic book store," she had a tone that implied she was checking to see if he remembered that she had mentioned it previously.
Of course I remember you told me that, Lex thought. He tried to commit every detail about her to his long-term memory. He nodded and silently began to slide over to the adjacent couch cushion. He only realized what he was doing when he was already moving. He decided that since he was already taking a chance…
Lex moved to the cushion that was adjacent to Rhone. She leaned back slightly as he approached, but didn't move otherwise. "I worked there with my best friend. She and I were – goddesses there," she said with a far off look in her eyes that told of her reminiscing. She realized how long it had been since she had even thought of Marie. Yet, when it came down to it, if it weren't for her, Rhone wouldn't be where she was today.
She had a large smile on her face, one that Lex had never seen before. He smiled as he committed that to memory as well. "Goddesses? That is a pretty powerful position," Lex perked an eyebrow.
"It's easy to be – desired -- among a crowd of stereotypical male comic book readers. Just be female. But if you can talk to them about the things they love – you are a goddess. Quite the ego trip," she looked back to him with a wide smile.
"So what happened?" Lex asked as he put an arm on the back of the couch.
"She died, maniac with a gun. It changed my life forever," Rhone said with no emotion. That was quite possibly the largest understatement ever.
"I'm sorry…" Lex said, feeling a little guilty for dredging this up. He could tell that Rhone and this girl were close.
She didn't reply to his apology. That never made sense to her, people apologizing for things they had absolutely nothing to do with. And he probably had to do that a lot – considering his lineage. "It's too bad," she smiled again and leaned her head on the hand that was resting on the back of the couch next to Lex's, "We had plans."
"Global domination?" Lex asked coyly.
She looked at him for a long moment with only a small hint of her previous smile on her face. Lex was about to apologize for being insensitive.
"You know," she said, "it's like you've known me my whole life."
He wasn't expecting that. "Why do you say that?" he asked.
"She and I used to say stuff like that all the time – jokingly of course," she added, thinking of Marie.
"What were the plans?" Lex didn't want the conversation to end.
"To do what we wanted to with our lives. Start our own comic book company where we did everything so no one could tell us what we could or couldn't do. Maybe have a store of our own wherever we wound up. …And we could have to. We wouldn't care if we spent the rest of our lives shopping at Goodwill or eating out of dumpsters just to make it happen," she was smiling widely again.
"Sounds – great," Lex said pondering the last part of her statement.
"I know. I wound up pretty far away from our dreams. But then, I think most people do. I never imagined that I would wind up some – government lackey," she was still looking into his eyes.
"You are not a government lackey. I think that you wound up pretty close to where you imagined. Your comic books are – superb," Lex gazed at her. He thought back to the call that he had received before she had arrived and a wave a joy washed over him. "Maybe you should quit your job and do comic books full time," he said.
"That," she hesitated, "is not an option." She had a contemplative look on her face.
Lex was going to wait until dinner, but he had to tell her. "I believe that everything is an option," he said in a matter-of-fact way.
"Said the son of a billionaire," Rhone smirked at him, "It is a little more complicated than you might think." Money wasn't the real reason she couldn't quit her job, obviously. She had obligations; her men were people she cared about and she couldn't leave them. Then whom would she have?
A smile had crept over Lex. It wasn't one that she had seen before – like a child that had just done something wonderful for his mother. Like picking her a bouquet of wild flowers or making an attempt at breakfast just because. "What?" she asked, as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
He held up his index finger to indicate "1 minute." He abruptly got up off the couch and left the room.