A/N: These are short interlude scenes. The first takes place sometime before 2x7, Lineage, and the second takes place shortly after 2x8, Ryan.

Chapter 20 - Secrets

Martha's first thought was that she was a bit young to be in menopause.

Not terribly young. It wasn't impossible. But when the missed period was followed up by nausea three mornings in a row, she decided to take a test. The second blue line wasn't exactly faint.

Her spike of joy immediately gave way to fear. She'd had dozens of dreams just like this, in the years after she and Jonathan married. Once it became clear that she'd never see them manifest in real life, she'd sometimes spend hours crying when she woke up after one of those dreams, the pain as deep as it had been on the day of each of her three miscarriages.

So, of course, she didn't tell Jonathan or Clark. Her past miscarriages had been in the very early stages, within the first couple of weeks, but even after those first weeks passed, she couldn't bring herself to tell them.

Keeping secrets was easy. Their whole family did it all the time. Keeping secrets from each other, though, that was more difficult. She didn't exactly feel guilty—it wasn't as if she was going to withhold the information forever, and she wasn't lying to them. But it was still challenging.

She longed to talk to them about how this could even be possible. Martha had given up hope of getting pregnant quite a long time ago, and she'd even been okay with it. Talking with other women struggling with infertility, she knew that adopting kids didn't always quite make up for the ones they could never have biologically, but in her case it really had. Clark was hers.

But they'd never adopted a second child to give Clark a sibling. They'd been too scared to, given Clark's secret.

And as for this child, they'd have to keep Clark's abilities secret from him until he was old enough to handle them. But they'd eventually tell him the truth.

It would drive the kid crazy if they didn't, constantly suspecting his family was keeping secrets from him.

He'd tried to fight it for so long.

Lex could have dealt with a few unexplained incidents, especially if they had nothing to do with him. But then there was the way Clark insisted, so quickly, that he and Lex couldn't be biological siblings, even in the face of strong evidence they might be. Then Lex was kidnapped, knocked out (yet another concussion), and nearly killed by his father's old lover, but somehow mysteriously survived—and Clark had gotten incredibly defensive when Lex had tried to speculate how. Then when Lex suggested that Ryan might have some kind of powers, Clark had accused him harshly of trying to take advantage of the kid.

Something was going on. Something that involved Clark, for sure, and maybe Lex, and definitely those meteor rocks, and probably that metal octagon—everyone was so weird about it—and possibly Level 3 . . .

The Kents obviously knew what it was, and they were lying to him. Lying over, and over, and over . . . And he couldn't take it anymore.

He didn't want to withdraw from them. He needed Clark's friendship, Mrs. Kent's care, and Mr. Kent's kindness far too desperately. His dark inner counterpart laughed and taunted him that he just wanted to be friends with them to keep gathering data for his investigations, but it was easy to ignore, given the fact that Lex would happily have died for them if he needed to.

Still, he couldn't deny, even to himself, that there was secrets being kept. It was frustrating, and aside from that, it hurt.

He wouldn't send investigators after the Kents again. He had promised Mrs. Kent he never would, and he would keep his promise—he owed them that much. But those initial investigations had yielded enough to give him some things to think about, and it seemed like at least once a week, something strange and unexplained happened that added to his knowledge.

Clark's friend Chloe had set up her "Wall of Weird" in the room where the Torch was printed. Lex could do the same kind of thing: keep his evidence all in one place. Some of his was in the form of physical items rather than newspaper clippings, though, so rather than a wall, he set aside a room of his house to display mementos of the things he'd learned.

As far as Lex knew, Clark wasn't upset with Chloe for her Wall of Weird, which meant he shouldn't be upset with Lex for his. Lex wasn't confident about that, though. Clark wasn't on Chloe's Wall of Weird—which Lex always wondered about—but he was quite prevalent in Lex's ongoing "investigations."

So Lex kept the room locked, and he didn't give anyone access, not even his servants. He was the only one who held a key to his Room of Obsession.

The darker piece of his soul was happy when he spent time in that room. It didn't torment him or berate him when he was in there, or for the hours after he left. It almost just . . . hummed.

The room held not only his curiosity at the strange events in Smallville, but his pain over the fact that the Kents clearly knew more than they were willing to tell him, despite claiming he was part of their family. More importantly, he hid away his anger in the room—anger over the lies, and the way Clark treated him when he asked questions.

If he couldn't fight the darkness, the best he could do was contain it. With that anger contained, it was like he had put a cage around his dark side. He could carry on in his every day life, even keep his friendship with the Kents, and no one would have to know the difference.

In the meantime, he focused, like he usually did, on making sure his priorities were as different from his father's as he could manage to make them. He played the continuous chess game against his father to keep the plant running and his employees cared for. He fought off a corrupt mayor to protect Smallville and its citizens. He helped Clark with his encounters with the weird, unexplained, and dangerous.

And all the while, he documented the evidence, quietly fearing that whatever the Kents were keeping from him would turn out to be a greater danger than he—or they—expected.