Progress. To any business, progress was always the goal - yet now, however, it was a word that Lex Luthor felt oddly dismayed to hear.

Part of his discharge to the community included a very strict treatment regimen which included weekly visits with a psychiatrist at an outpatient clinic contracted with Arkham Asylum to monitor his stability. After a short while seeing the shrink, Lex had grown confident in his ability to play the game with him, until now. He had, admittedly, found the presence of a personal nurse to be a considerable help in the past six weeks since Claire Branigan arrived at his doorstep, especially given the fact that the rest of his hired help had failed to return as planned. She had, though Lex would be hard-pressed to say so in so many words, come to be indispensable.

Doctor Cavendish, Arkham's illustrious director, had taken on personally seeing Lex Luthor on an outpatient basis because no one else could be counted on to shoulder such potential liability. He left the room briefly to take a personal phonecall - but had negligently left his clipboard in the room with Lex, who could simply not help getting up from his seat to peer over at the notes on the paper.

Mr. Luthor appears to be stabilizing and making considerable progress. May soon return to fully independent functioning with no requirement of in-home services. Recommendation to reduce services over the next four weeks.

His lip curled slightly into a sneer as he shuffled back over to his seat, crossing his legs and resting his arms on the armrests of his chair. Stabilizing. Progress. All of these things were meant to be positive, but he held others' ideas of what was positive in incredibly low regard. He saw the basis for the assessment, granted - he had slowly begun coming more frequently in person to LexCorp headquarters rather than by videoconference, and was for all intents and purposes slowly entering back into what could be considered a normal life. Normal for Lex Luthor, anyway.

This was not positive in the least. On the contrary, it meant more than one very negative thing. First, it meant there was a growing risk that he would get to a point where he would be again held accountable for things he had done, and being held accountable meant a lot of things that Lex did not even want to begin to consider. Second, it meant that he would no longer need help - and therefore, no longer need a nurse. That, for whatever reason, seemed an equally regrettable possibility.

And both of these things were possibilities Lex Luthor was committed to preventing. He was well-read enough to know precisely what needed to be heard and documented in order to maintain his case. It wouldn't be... too much of a stretch. he would always bee seen as crazy. Psychotic seemed to be the label of choice, whether he acquiesced to it or not. If there was nothing he could do to change their opinions, he would give them precisely what they wanted. After all, he only bothered pushing back against those whom he considered powerful - he only bothered refuting those whose opinions mattered.

"Doctor!" he said brightly when the psychiatrist reentered. Lex drummed his fingers restlessly on the table next to his chair, bounced his leg in his chair. "I thought you weren't coming back. Thought you'd forgotten about me -"

"My apologies, Mister Luthor," Doctor Cavendish said. "I was just answering a personal phonecall - urgent. My son went home sick from school today -"

"You were talking about me, weren't you?" Lex asked with an eery grin, leaning forward and cocking his head to one side. "Of course you were. I heard you. I heard you through the door."

"Mister Luthor, I wasn't talking about you outside. You don't need to worry -"

"I'm not worrying, I'm telling you, I heard you!" Lex said, flinging his arms out wide, then beaming again and adding in a sing-song sort off voice, "I know you're keeping secrets, Doctor! I know! You want me back in Arkham, don't you? Do you get an extra holiday bonus for it? An extra turkey and a heaping bowl of stuffing for the little ones if you get big bad Mister Luthor back in a straightjacket?"

"Mister Luthor, listen to me," Doctor Cavendish insisted. "I wasn't talking about you -"

"You were," Lex insisted, shutting his eyes briefly and shaking his head, holding up an index finger to interrupt. "Doctor. Let's not be surreptitious here, I heard you talking about me outside with all of them."

"Mister Luthor," Doctor Cavendish interrupted, clearly perturbed by the accusation at having been talking about his most prolific patient outside in an empty lobby, and even more disturbed by the fact that Lex looked actually pleased, convinced of the veracity of his own words. Cavendish was in fact perhaps so thrown that he did not even think to take Lex's sudden shift in behavior beyond face value, and Lex's elation at having convinced someone trained and so thoroughly educated translated into an even more convincing facade of true mania. Perhaps, some small part of it was not even a facade at all. "I think your session is over for today. I'm afraid you may have found this one a little overwhelming. I'll see you again at our next meeting?"

"Of course, of course," Lex chirped, never breaking eye contact with Doctor Cavendish while getting to his feet and striding towards the door out of the office. Cavendish, however, broke the eye contact first and began scrawling notes down on his clipboard. Lex felt a thrill at the sound of pen scratching over paper, crossing out the previous notes he had jotted down. "But don't think I'll have forgotten! I never forget."

And as he left the clinic and strode out to his car outside, Lex grinned smugly at his victory. he had come so close to losing it all yet again, but this time, he had learned. He had beaten his circumstances, and managed to retain his innocence and his nurse - who at the moment was his only ally. Claire would be rather pleased to know it, he decided. It was job security.

Now, however, he had bigger fish to fry. Since Claire would not be around to hear the good news until tomorrow, there was work to be done and only one worthy of doing it. It had been a good while since Lex had touched some of the furthest recessed of the data he and his team had gone to such pains to collect, but this close call had reawakened his enthusiasm for his former research. There were a handful of supplemental files that he had not housed in the main servers due to their lack of completeness, but now, they would be of potential use. He knew now that Bruce Wayne knew things that he was not intended to know, but could not know everything.

"No," Lex muttered to himself with a smirk, his face illuminated by the light of the computer screen. "There are many things you don't know, Mister Wayne."

If the Bat of Gotham was expanding his team, Lex Luthor was happy to do the same.

"Eeny, meeny, miney..." Lex chirped to himself as he began scrolling his cursor over the list of raw filenames with a girn in his face. "Mo."

He finally settled on one file in particular, completely luck of the draw. He hummed discordantly as he opened the folder, waiting as the bundle of files loaded to reveal a photograph of a man, a set of coordinates to a location in Cape Verde. Almost cackling in glee, he nearly dropped his phone as he fished it out of his pocket to make a call to a very important friend. "Hello, hello, Mister Lubrano! Lex Luthor here - change of plans," he said with a jovial lilt. "I have some merchandise that I'll need you to have delivered to me from Cape Verde. Fragile goods. I'm willing to pay extra insurance for its safe delivery."

"Mister Luthor, do you care to explain this?"

Claire appeared highly skeptical, even displeased when she arrived for duty the next day, holding an envelope from the nursing agency she worked for, packaged in an overnight bubble mailer. Lex chuckled a little at the fact that whatever it was, was urgent.

"I don't need to look at it," he said jovially, his eyebrows giving a playful quirk. "It's about my incident at the psychiatrist's office, isn't it? Word does travel fast. Wonders of the internet, welcome to the future - "

"It says I'm suposed to work out with you as many hours as you need, not to exceed sixty hours per week," Claire said, yanking the letter out of the envelope and following Lex inside the house. "Sixty hours," she repeated. "Mister Luthor, I frankly don't have sixty hours a week to spend with you. Why does it say that you have - what is this? An urgent need for more intensive services?"

"Well, the voices, Claire, of course."

'The..." Claire's voice trailed off, and Lex took a moment to observe her expression - he was surprised to see that the first look to flicker across her features was not one of annoyance, but of worry. The night after the party briefly returned to his mind, though it had never been spoken of again between the two of them since. She was worried, he realized with smirk. Within seconds though, her worry turned into a look of exasperation, and she spoke through a slightly clenched jaw in a clear attempt not to lose her temper. "You don't hear voices, Mister Luthor."

"No. I don't - I do like them clever!" he chirped, reaching out and gently tapping the tip of his index finger on her forehead - he'd found early on that she was relatively unfazed by these small encroachments on her personal space, and so had grown fond over the past month of pushing her boundaries little by little. "But if I didn't say I heard those voices, then soon I wouldn't be hearing your dulcet tones echoing through my halls anymore, and you my dear would be out of work. As the head of LexCorp, I would much rather be a job creator than a job destroyer. Can you imagine the PR implications?"

Claire's evident conflict played out on her face, which seemed unable to decide on an expression or an emotion. First was suprise, even affront at the fact that Lex was faking and expecting her to play along, second was doubt - because in order to remain in compliance with the directions from the Bat, she had to play along. And finally, though fleeting, was a sense of flattery that a small part of the reason for it was to keep her as a nurse.

"Well. This has been lovely. Just lovely. But I do have plans for the day," Lex chimed in, interrupting her thoughts. "Important ones that require your presence. Come, come."

He gestured for her to follow before making an overdramatic sweeping gesture, striding down the hallway to the guest suite and throwing open the closet to reveal that it was about half-full of clothes.

"I've found," Lex began, making a wagging gesture with his index finger, "that having someone in awful hospital scrubs following you around everywhere - even someone as cherubic as you, Nurse Claire - is extremely stigmatizing. So, I've taken the liberty of providing you with some new work attire."

"Those look like cocktail dresses."

"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to."

Lex crossed his arms and again mused over her reaction, and felt inclined to see if he could push it even just a little more, reaching out and plucking a particular hanger out of the closet and holding it out in her direction. Claire's head tilted to one side at the sight of the dark red sheath dress - nothing lascivious, but definitely not scrubs. She took the hanger from Lex's hand and held it up, glancing it over with a skeptical quirk of her eyebrow.

"I daresay I've gotten your size correct. I'm something of a whiz at guesstimation," he chuckled to himself. "I'll give you a moment to get dressed. Main driveway in ten!"

And without giving her a chance to refuse, Lex whirled out of the guest suite, shutting the door behind him.

Claire's expression while she took her long hair out of its ponytail and slipped into the red dress was one of mild annoyance, but she had committed to playing along with this, to whatever end. It was just a job, she reminded herself. It was just a job.

She would be even harder pressed to do so, however, when she arrived outside and found that Lex Luthor had pulled up not in his car, but on his motorcycle. Her jaw clenched as he held a helmet out in her direction.

"I find it more therapeutic than the car - also more gas economic. LexCorp is committed to preserving Mother Earth, after all," he said with a roguish smirk. "Hop on, I have a reservation that we really shouldn't miss."

Just a job, she reminded herself as she fastened the helmet onto her head, carefully leaving her hair twisted up inside. She got onto the back of the bike and flinched when the engine gave a loud roar.

"Hold on tight, Nurse Claire," Lex chuckled - and by the amused tone in his voice, which was audible even from underneath his helmet, he had no intention of being a safe driver. Left without a choice, Claire held tightly around Lex's midsection from behind as they zoomed through the streets of Metropolis, making no efforts to stay off of the busiest roads or to remain discreet.

It was probably a blessing that Claire hadn't had time for breakfast this morning, she thought as they finally pulled up in front of La Parisienne, a well-liked cafe in uptown Metropolis, because the ride had left her feeling a little queasy. She seemed thirsty for air when she finally was able to dismount from Lex's bike and remove the helmet.

"Not so bad, was it?" he asked, reaching out to assist her in unbuckling the helmet and placing back with the bike before, without warning, reaching out and gently grabbing her arm, looping it through his. She stared at him questioningly and would have opened her mouth to speak if she hadn't seen his eyes dart to a spot somewhere across the street, Her gaze briefly followed and landed on a man who appeared to be discreetly trying to take a photo or video with his phone. Paparazzi.

This was about being seen. Claire fought the urge to roll her eyes, knowing that embarrassing Lex Luthor now would undermine all of the work she had already done. For multiple reasons, perhaps, she did not consider that an option. So, she played along and kept her arm loosely linked with his as they were shown inside to a table by the maitre'd'.

She did not appear amused the entire time, however, and Lex internally grew wary of the possibility of another bad headline - it would be minor, of course, and he had been called far worse things is recent months than a bad date, but yet another affront to his reputation was something he simply could not afford.

"Give 'em a smile for me, wouldja?" he muttered, beaming falsely, not knowing what angles the cameras might be shooting from. The fake, halfhearted attempt at a grin that he received from Claire when she looked up from her menu, however, was clearly not what he had been hoping for. Quickly, he leaned slightly across the table towards Claire and ran his finger around the rim of her glass of ice water with lemon, and beamed as he began reciting something he knew would get a reaction from her one way or another. "You are old, Father William, the young man said - and your hair has become very white. And yet you incessantly stand on your head. Do you think at your age, that is right?"

Claire's eyes widened slightly in recognition - Lewis Carroll. While she never lost sight of the fact that Lex Luthor was a brilliantly intelligent man with an excellent memory, she had for whatever reason never expected him to remember something that was particularly of interest to her so quickly. "In my youth, Father William replied to his son, I feared it might injure the brain. But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again!"

And she laughed - truly laughed - as Lex managed word for word to spout out the rest of the poem, even as their food was brought out to them and the waiters brought by a pair of mimosas to accompany their meal. "There she is," Lex said with a strangely placid, lopsided grin as he reached out and gave Claire's hand a squeeze. The action caused a small bit of the amusement to fade from her eyes and she stopped laughing for the moment, but regathered her composure, realizing that all of this was for the cameras.

It was unprofessional, and if she was seen this way with any other patient, she would have lost her job. But this was Lex Luthor, and still, he made his own rules that others were expected to follow.

It came as no surprise that Lex Luthor was interesting and engaging - Claire had spent enough time with him over the past month to know that despite his abundant eccentricities, he was anything but a boring conversationalist. There were even brief, fleeting moments where the line between the show for paparazzi and actual enjoyment of their conversation on both sides seemed to blur.

This was put on pause, however, when Lex suddenly seemed distracted - he glanced at the time, then at his surroundings with rapid movements of his eyes. Immediately, Claire's brain seemed to switch gears at well because she knew well enough this meant that something was worrying him. Reflexively, she gently leaned over and meant to ask him if anything was wrong, before he held up his hand and got to his feet, putting on a false smile.

"Excuse me for a moment. Restroom," he said with a shrug, walking towards the back of the restaurant, leaving Claire confused at their table. She blinked a few times and took a sip from her mimosa. Something was off, she realized, and in that moment she reminded that she wasn't hired to be good company. She was hired to look out for his best interests, and in this instance, that meant going after him. Folding her napkin and placing it on the table, she got to her feet as well and followed the same beeline to the back of the restaurant where the restrooms were located. When she reached the narrow back hallway just past the kitchens, however, she realized that the door to the back alley was ajar - and that people were situated just outside the door, talking.

"Well?"

"The shipment will take a few weeks," a man spoke up. Claire peered around as unobtrusively as she could and realized that this was Lubrano, the man who she had once seen at Luthor Mansion meeting with Lex. "But things are going just as planned, Mister Luthor. The particular piece you're interested in shouldn't be difficult to track down."

"Perfect. Perfect!" Lex said, clapping his hands together. "There's a reason why you're my favorite antiques dealer, Mister Lubrano. So very efficient. I do like them efficient."

Claire fought back a wave of queasiness at hearing this exchange - not only was she a publicity stunt. She was now a cover for whatever Lex was doing. She was complicit in all of it, just like she had become complicit in spying on him.

She had become so distraught at the thought of all of these things that she didn't think to get out of the way. So, when Lex pushed the door open and returned to the back hallway of the restaurant, she was still standing in the same spot, dumbfounded. For a moment, they locked eyes - her brown eyes filled with disbelieving disdain, and his green eyes glinting with the sudden, instinctive sharpness of a fighting animal backed into a corner. He'd done it now, he realized. All of that saintly concern, that sweet, doe-eyed kindness and maternal nurturing - he'd wondered when he'd be able to break it. Surely now, he had. Surely now, he'd found the test she couldn't pass. With an expression halfway between a sneer and a smirk, he wordlessly tried to sweep past her, back into the restaurant.

"Mister Luthor," Claire said in a conspiratorial whisper, garnering no reaction. "Lex."

And again, uncontrollably, the use of his first name caused him to turn and look at her with an irked eyebrow. "So that's what this all was?" she asked, keeping her voice low. "A cover for your antiques business?" she spat, emphasizing that she didn't believe for a moment that it was antiques Lex Luthor was trying to import. "Lex, answer -"

"Careful," he said, his voice suddenly both charming and dangerous as he gently took the crook of her arm, pulling her close to him just abruptly enough so that she stumbled slightly, having to brace herself against his chest. He smirked at the closeness and the contact and pushed it one step further, gently using the side of his finger to tip her chin up to look him in the eye. The any onlooker, it was a romantic, sensual embrace, and even Claire had to admit to a strange quality in their physical proximity - but she knew better. "Don't. Cause. A. Scene."

The last four words were whispered, leaning close to her face, looking very directly into her eyes and finally closed off with a lingering brush of his lips on her forehead before he released his hold on her arm, allowing her to straighten up and regain her composure. Now, she was struck silent by the brief exchange, and Lex smirked, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Very good," he said in a low whisper. "Now we're going to finish our brunch and go back to the bike, and we're going to go home. Is that clear?"

Claire paused, her eyes perusing Lex's expression and his posture - he was amused by this. He thought he had every right, and suddenly, Claire felt an uncharacteristic sense of anger rising from the pit of her stomach. Ever since the night after the party, since his fears and vulnerabilities were laid so raw before her, she had given him the benefit of the doubt. He needed to be cared for, she reminded herself. He needed to have someone he could rely on. But, Claire realized as she looked down at the way she was dressed, as looked around at where she was, she was down the rabbit hole now.

"As crystal, Mister Luthor," she said coolly. But Lex wasn't so much interested in the calmness of her voice as he was the coldness in her eyes - he had done it. He had done away with that warmth he had seen in her the night of the party, and in doing so, proven himself correct about the nature of people. Goodness was weak. Goodness could be exhausted, and always would be in the end.

A/N

First of all, thank you everyone for your feedback last chapter! Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that there might indeed be a rating change to the story, as this seems to be the preferred direction. Now, it merely depends on which scenes make the cut! Like I mentioned before, the next couple of chapters are really going to lay the groundwork for how Lex and Claire come to be more allies than nurse/patient, and from there, we will start delving more deeply into some bigger, badder developments. I'll leave it up to your imagination what lies in store

Also, for my guest reviewer who is really eager to see Superman again, patience. The dramatic tension hasn't reached that nice rolling boil just yet!

As always, thank you, thank you, thank you! I hope you all enjoy this chapter, and until next time, cheers!