"Did you enjoy yourself, Master Wayne?"

"Never do, Alfred."

Bruce loosened his tie the instant he got into the darkened back seat of the car that Alfred had arrived in for him. The older man glanced into the rearview mirror and gave a smirk at the man in the back seat, a mischievous glint in his eye.

"Then I believe this is considered mission accomplished," he supplied dryly. "And Mister Luthor?"

"The nurse is more than capable of keeping an eye on him. She can hold her own," Bruce nodded as they pulled out of the front driveway, away from the throng of cars that still remained parked, still obviously schmoozing as much as they could. "But Luthor is up to something - and I made it clear that we were up to trouble of our own. Maybe by a short stint in Arkham has taught him that some things are better not meddled in."

"Do you believe that, Master Wayne?"

"If I did," he said, reaching up and gently massaging the bridge of his nose, shaking his head tiredly, "I wouldn't be pulling innocent bystanders into the crosshairs like this. The fact of the matter is, Lex Luthor doesn't answer to us. We can't keep him in line. Only someone on the inside can, and the nurse is the closest thing we have. He's dependent on her. Very attached to her."

"And how safe do you think the girl is, being that close to someone so unstable?"

"Not safe at all," Bruce admitted. "Which is why we're keeping a close eye on her as well. We need her."

"I'm not getting paid for this, let me remind you."

Claire couldn't help her expression from growing sour when, standing alone with Lex in the middle of the large receiving room after everyone had left, they realized that the caterers had only cleaned up their own supplies, and that there was still a great deal left to be done. She had already taken off her shoes and tied her hair loosely back, realizing now that they'd need to be cleaning up the rest themselves.

"Florentino usually handled the event planning, I can't be expected to know all of the necessary minutia," Lex said, arching an eyebrow and glancing around the area. There was generally not a great deal to be done - mostly glasses and tablecloths that needed to be gathered and put away. The fact remained, however, that he hadn't had to put any planning into his own events in the past - it had always been done for him. Claire bit back the urge to ask what was taking his staff so long to return, since he was so assured that they would. Instead, she began picking up and draping tablecloths over her arm to bring down to the laundry area. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lex moving towards the remaining empty glasses and presumably bringing them back downstairs to the kitchen, but when he returned, he was still carrying two glasses and had a bottle tucked under his arm.

"I noticed you didn't have a drink all night," he pointed out, placing the glasses down on the now bare table after Claire had removed the tablecloth. He poured a small amount of liquor into each glass - from the smell of it, butterscotch Schnapps. Claire smirked a little, having expected someone of Lex Luthor's status to have more adult taste, but simultaneously not surprised at all. He was very much like a child, so the fascination with sweets and candy - even to the extent of the liquor he favored - was hardly a stretch. "What kind of a host would I be if I didn't offer? You're a guest in my home, after all."

"So now I'm a guest?" Claire asked skeptically. "After I've cleaned finished entertaining your other guests and cleaning up after them, I'm a guest -"

"Bottoms up, Miss Branigan," he interrupted, using the knuckle of his index finger to slide the glass in her direction before taking a drink himself. Claire rolled her eyes, but begrudgingly picked up the glass and took a sip as well. "I'd consider tonight a success, wouldn't you?" he asked pointedly, clearly expecting a particular answer. Claire forced a tight-lipped smile and tilted her head to one side.

"An absolute success," she nodded politely.

Lex, however, seemed displeased - his mood quickly shifted, and he put his glass down. Claire grimaced when she noticed that he had actually already downed most of it. He turned away, starting to pass back and forth across an invisible line that was only about a yard's length from point to point, scratching the back of his neck with his fingertips.

"No. No, it wasn't," he snapped, shaking his head fervently, clearly not appeased by Claire's response. "It was awful. I can tell. I can see what they think of me and it's far from what they should be thinking," he began rambling, his actions becoming more frenetic, his rubbing and scratching more agitated. "This is terrible. Terrible."

"Mister Luthor," Claire said pointedly, and he seemed suddenly stunned by the fact that she gently reached out, closing her hand around his wrist and pulling it away from his neck which was now reddened from his agitated rubbing and scratching. "You shouldn't do that."

His face twitched in an unreadable expression at the small show of concern from Claire. It was such a small gesture, and yet had yanked him out of the state of mind he had been in, into a new state of confusion. He, of course, was aware of his habits - but no one had ever thought to stop him this way.

"The party was fine," Claire said in a calming voice, almost as though she were attempting to pacify a child. It was almost maternal, Lex realized, and this quality was something that he found strangely hypnotic. "I think you need some air. Come on."

Lex tensed when Claire looped an arm through his, which was now shoved into his pocket, and began guiding him upstairs to the balcony - here, unlike the atmosphere inside, the air was cooler and less suffocating. It didn't give the feeling of things closing in around him.

The nurse, he grudgingly admitted internally, probably knew what she was doing.

Lex walked out onto the balcony and took in a deep breath, walking towards the railing and leaning his forearms onto it, staring out once again at Metropolis. His father had specifically built this home this way in this location, because from nearly every angle, it overlooked Metropolis. He was convinced he would own the city that looked as though it lay at his feet - and through the harshest coercion, by brute force, Lex Luthor Senior had made sure that his son would inherit that conviction.

"It's a long, long way down," Lex said in a near mumble, looking over the edge to the gardens below. "A long fall from Paradise. I know what they think of me, you know," he added to Claire, though he didn't look back over the shoulder at her. "I could see it. Hear it. I was right about all of them and their pretensions - they came here to gloat that they're all still as rich and gluttonous as ever while I'm... while I'm..."

"Mister Luthor?"

Lex moved suddenly, so he was standing up on the flat top of the ornate railing along the balcony's edge, and Claire felt her heart skip a beat as he positioned himself with his arms out wide, casting his jacket back on the balcony behind him. "Couldn't you just imagine being a fly on the wall of your own funeral?" he chuckled darkly to himself, looking out over the city. "Hearing the things they say about you once they think you can't hear them? That's when people are honest. That's the only time - when they have nothing to lose anymore."

"Lex."

The use of his first name was rare nowadays, and was enough to get his attention - but as he turned his head back to respond, his footing wavered and he found his balance starting to falter. As he began swaying, attempting to regain balance but at the sometime wondering what it would be like to simply let himself fall, he saw from the corner of his eye that Claire had immediately lunged forward, grabbing a hold of one of his hands and pulling him back onto the balcony - they both landed on the floor with a slight thud, and Claire grimaced at having landed awkwardly on her shoulder, rolling off of it with a pained expression.

"What the hell was that?" she said, her voice suddenly shrill and a little bit breathless as she used her other hand to give Lex's shoulder a slight shove. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Morbid curiosity," he supplied vaguely, his voice blank as he regarded Claire's expression - it looked frantic, enraged. Scared. One side of his mouth quirked into a disbelieving smirk at the fact that he was able to elicit such a reaction from her. "You were worried," he said with a chuckle to himself. "You care about me."

"I care about my job," Claire said, quickly getting to her feet and dusting herself off with a huff of exasperation. "Don't start getting ideas."

"I am your job. Therefore, you care about me. Still a compliment," Lex said, suddenly now appearing calm and even amused, not the unstable and morbid tumult of moments earlier. It pleased him, knowing that he had that kind of influence on her, whatever the reasons were. Claire pursed her lips gently and took a few breaths through her nose, shaking her head slowly.

"Let's go back inside," she said in that tone of forced propriety that Lex Luthor was in fact very familiar with - he'd grown acquainted with it in Metropolis State, as it was her response of choice when he got himself in over his head with the other inmates. It meant that she was tactfully declining to express how infuriated she was, how exasperated, how exhausted - and the fact that she felt those things was amusement enough. He got to his feet behind her and took oddly jumpy steps - almost as though he was skipping - all the way to his room. "You've had a long day," Claire supplied. "You need rest."

"My sleeping pills are downstairs."

"You're not taking them tonight," Claire said sternly - and in an unusual show of assertiveness and strength, she shut the door behind her and stood in front of it. "You've had a few drinks, and as your nurse -"

"You're off duty."

"Then as... as a decent human being who isn't a piece of shit, I can't let you take them."

And again, quickly as before, Lex's countenance shifted - his expression twisted again into a near-scowl and his eyes narrowed in Claire's direction as though thinking that somehow, he would manage to intimidate her into changing her mind. He only ceased this tactic when he remembered that she'd held her ground against much bigger, much more physically superior inmates before him.

"I won't be sleeping tonight, then."

The statement was made under his breath, but because the room itself was quiet, Claire was able to make it out fine. Her stance relaxed so that inside of being cross-armed, she had one hand resting on her hip, taking a couple of steps forward to where Lex had sit down at the foot of the bed.

"Why can't you sleep?"

"Because I don't need to."

"You don't need to or you don't want to?"

Lex's hands clenched at his sides - again with that tone of voice. He wasn't even sure why he thought of it as maternal. He wouldn't have known what maternal sounded like to begin with. But that sense of knowing and not saying, of worrying but not showing, was the closest he could imagine to it. He found it comforting, but that sense of comfort was in and of itself unsettling. He had never known the care of a mother - only that he had been sorely deprived of it and left instead with a drunk megalomaniac of a father. His mother must have been wonderful, he had always thought as a young boy, if his father resented him so much for the loss of her. His boyhood had been torture from which he had never been delivered, and it seemed that adulthood would be the same.

"Have you forgotten where I've been, Claire?" he said, his voice tight, his gaze cast down to his clenched fists. "Have you forgotten the way people screamed at night? The way the wind rattled the barred windows, the way there was always the jingling of keys and the sound of footsteps that you never knew where they were coming from? Did you forget, that was my life? I've seen things. I've heard things."

And then, in his line of vision, he saw her face again - she had slowly approached and was now crouched next to where he sat on the bed, her face soft and concerned. "I know," she said gently, her voice void of judgment or sarcasm. "But that isn't your life here. Nothing is going to happen to you."

This nurturing was an unnatural, surreal experience - Lex stared down in almost child-like confusion when Claire gently grasped both of his hands and coaxed him to unclench his fists. It was such a simple gesture, one that took very little effort to read, but at the same time, the frankness of it left him in a state of vulnerability that he simply could not accept.

"I understand completely, Claire," he said with a forced, almost sickly-looking chuckle. He could think of no other way to respond to her treatment of him. Why, he thought with great tumult, was she intervening this way? "You don't want me overdosing on your watch, going out in rockstar fashion, facedown in bed. Certainly not something you'd note on your resume."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night, Mister Luthor," she replied with a smirk.

"It'll help if you stayed until I fell asleep. Chased away the boogeymen," he said, testing the waters - people did not stay when they had nothing to gain, and eventually, he would bring it out in her. He took pleasure in forcing people to show their very worst selves, because it proved him right in his assessment of the very nature of people. "Pull up a chair."

"Fine."

And as directed, she moved into an armchair close to the bed, gently drawing her legs up underneath her and cocking her head to the side, looking at Lex. He clearly had not expected her to agree, and in order to save face, he kicked off his shoes and laid on his bed on top of the covers, half expecting her to leave. She did not. He shut his eyes, his ears tuned to hear if she walked away and was untrue to her word. But, all the way up until he finally succumbed to sleep, he didn't hear her budge the slightest from the chair.

Claire had waited until Lex Luthor was undeniably asleep before she slowly got out of the seat to leave - after spending so many nights as his nurse in the infirmary, she was strangely proud of her ability to identify a real snore from the man. She started towards the door, but paused and turned back, jotting something down quickly on a gum wrapper on the bedside table before leaving.

Her personal cell phone number, with the words just in case scrawled along the bottom.

The first day she had come to work as his nurse, she had made a point to specify that if there was anything that he needed during her off days, he should call the agency rather than trying to reach her. But something about seeing him this way - seeing that there was a strange desperation to him, lurking just underneath the lunacy that everyone was so familiar with - had stirred up enough concern in her to break protocol in this instance. In any case, she'd likely respond faster personally than the agency would

That, she mused to herself as she got into her car and made her way back downtown to her apartment, was justification enough, wasn't it? She was concerned. For a patient.

She finally returned home to her apartment - a dingy, sad hole of a place compared to Luthor Mansion, but home nonetheless - and glanced around the room, half-expecting and preparing for another interrogation, only to find that this time, she had come home to an empty apartment and was in fact alone. She sighed in relief as she trudged towards her own twin-bed, slumping tiredly onto it and curling up on her side without bothering to get dressed. No Lex Luthor. No Batman.

"Thank God," she murmured to herself as she allowed herself to fall quickly asleep.

A/N

Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your support for the story so far. I've gotten more of the plot planned out so far, and it will hopefully cover a few distinct story arcs. This chapter didn't bring in a lot of the other characters who are going to be major players in the story, but the next chapter most definitely will. You all are the best - and hearing from you absolutely makes my day.

I'm still very much changing things as I go, so if there is anything/anyone you would like to see in the story, shoot me a suggestion in the reviews, and I will definitely consider everything to see how it fits into my story. I want to make the most of the characters that the DC Extended Universe can provide without stretching myself too thin.

Anyway, until next time, cheers!