A/N: Direct quotes from 2x22, Calling. I own nothing.
Chapter 39 - Reign
Lex Luthor felt better than he ever had.
He washed his face of the last traces of his weakness, ordered a servant to clean up the broken glass in his bedroom—they were used to broken items around the mansion, as his father had a hotter temper than he did—and started the walk down to the garage where his cars were kept.
His head of security approached him on his way down. "Mr. Luthor, Martha Kent came to the front gate."
"I thought I told you to turn the Kents away."
"She's already gone, but she asked me to bring you this." He held out an envelope.
Lex's name was written on the envelope in Clark's handwriting. He took the envelope and waved his security guard away. He might need to rearrange his guards' assignments; he knew his head of security liked the Kents.
Lex stopped by a drawer in the hallway, rummaging around until he found what he was looking for—a lighter. He set fire to the envelope and let it, along with its contents, burn down until the fire grew close too close to his fingers, then he slipped into a bathroom and dropped the last tiny corner of unburnt paper into a sink. Then he continued on his walk down to the garage.
When Martha and Clark had gotten sick, Lex had come into her office to talk to her about them, and she'd become very closed off, the way the Kents always did when they were hiding something. At the time, she was analyzing a blood sample. Ever since then, an unlabeled blood sample sat untouched in her refrigerator.
There was something special about that blood. If it had been Martha's, there would probably have been some mention of its abnormality in her medical file—there was nothing, so he doubted it. It was probably Clark's.
And that made sense. Clark was the unusual one.
He drove down to the hospital and strode down the hall to Helen's office.
"What are you doing? Helen will know if you steal from her!"
Lex winced. His inner weakness. He should have known it wouldn't leave him alone. If anything, he was surprised it had taken so long to catch onto what was happening and figure out how to speak up. He pushed aside its protests and put the key she'd given him into the lock.
An orderly came by as he was about to open the door. "Oh, hi. You know Dr. Bryce?"
"Not very well," she said.
Perfect. The orderly wouldn't bother to confirm his story with Helen if she didn't know her. "I'm her fiance. She asked me to pick something up for her."
She nodded and kept walking, and he let himself into the office.
Thanks to his idiotic choice to show her his Room of Obsession, Helen knew he was after evidence about the Kents and everything else connected to it. She was inconveniently intelligent. If he just took the blood, she'd know exactly what had happened. A clean crime was his style. He had to make this as different from his own style as he possibly could.
He threw a pile of papers into the air and watched them scatter across the floor.
"NO! STOP, STOP!"
He ignored the voice. He continued to toss papers until the surfaces were mostly cleared. Then he pulled out drawers, dumped out their contents onto the tables and floor, and threw the drawers themselves against the walls.
"You son of a—"
"Shut up," he muttered, reaching into the little refrigerator to pick up the blood sample. "I got what you wanted." On a second thought, he took everything out of the refrigerator, so it wouldn't look like the thief had been looking for anything in particular.
He glanced around the ransacked office. She would never suspect Lex had done this, and even if she did, she'd believe his denial. Maybe showing her the Room of Obsession had been the right choice to make. She'd believe he was inherently honest.
He checked his watch. He was supposed to be meeting her out in front of the hospital in five minutes to go over some wedding plans. On his way out, he checked his surroundings and, seeing no witnesses, broke the lock.
Lex went around the side door so he could meet her from the outside. She was already waiting for him, a clipboard in her hand. He listened to her ramble on and on about seating arrangements for the wedding, and then she actually had the audacity to suggest he view the wedding as an opportunity to make up with his father.
She was shocked by the trashed office. Lex immediately offered to call the police, to cast suspicion off of himself. It seemed to work.
She paced while he made the call, clearly distressed. For a moment, he felt for her—deep sympathy, but he quickly realized he was feeling what his inner weakness felt.
He tolerated her for awhile after that. She talked too much, and she was irritatingly intelligent and perceptive, but she was really hot, so it was worth it. He figured he could probably get her to sleep with him after the rehearsal dinner, too.
The rehearsal dinner was a little pathetic, and extremely uncomfortable. Lex didn't have any family members or friends there, of course, which meant he spent most of the time making awkward small talk with Helen's relatives who he'd never met before and had never wanted to meet.
Helen and Lex sat side by side at the head table, listening to her family members make toasts. Lex figured it would be advantageous to have a wife who was a doctor to the Kents. And her body was a nice perk. But he didn't think it would last. He wished he weren't actually marrying her—it would be a lot of paperwork and hassle to get rid of her once he'd figured out the Kents' secrets and had enough of her body—but he couldn't exactly call it off now. If he did, he wouldn't be able to get what he wanted.
"You're despicable."
Lex threw on another fake smile as another of Helen's family members finished a toast.
"I won't let you do this to her."
He smirked. His inner weakness wasn't about to stop him.
"There's one thing you didn't count on," the voice said.
Helen turned toward him, and he suddenly realized the voice was right. He'd miscalculated. Severely.
"I still love her."
Helen reached up, gently took his face in her hands, and kissed him deeply.
The effect was immediate—he didn't even have time to enjoy the kiss. He felt himself being shoved back into the shadows—
Lex opened his eyes.
Helen pulled back and smiled, and he kissed her again, this time as himself, though he had to cut the kiss short because his lips kept trying to smile.
The smile was nothing more than a reflex. The past eight hours had been the most terrifying of his life—trapped in his own body, fully conscious and aware of his actions but unable to control them—and her lips against his felt so amazing by contrast. He gathered her up into his arms and held her close, disbelieving how he ever could have deserved someone so brilliant and beautiful.
Meanwhile, he could feel his insides trembling. Maybe re-caging his inner darkness should have felt like more of a victory than it did, but the fact was that he now knew this was possible. The darkness could take him over without his consent.
It had never been strong enough to take over even for a minute in the past—not enough to truly force him to take actions. He'd been persuaded by it before, but it had always been him making the choices. Now it had taken over for a day. If it had done it once, it could do it again.
He and Helen retreated to his study after the wedding rehearsal. He left for a minute to pour a couple of glasses of wine, and returned to find her staring off into space.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said.
He knew what fine meant. He braced himself for a tough night. "Helen, if we're gonna spend our lives together, we need to be completely honest with each other. You're always saying that." A pang of guilt arose in his stomach as he said it. He'd stolen from her.
"I found a file on Mrs. Kent in your bookshelf. It contained confidential medical records. From my office."
His heart sank, but he forced himself to remain casual. "I got that from one of the disease control agents who was investigating Mrs. Kent's case."
"You mean you bribed someone for it."
It had been closer to a threat, but he wasn't going to tell her that. "I've told you. The Kents are very important to me. I was concerned about Martha's health." That was painfully true, and yet it was still a lie.
You coward, he chided himself, and it wasn't his darkness talking. You lying, two-faced coward. He couldn't even blame his darkness for these lies. They were all him.
He looked Helen deep in the eyes. "What were you looking for anyway?"
"Something that was stolen from my office.
His heart jumped, but again, he kept his face straight. Years of practice had perfected his ability to do so. "Do you think I was involved in the break-in?"
"Please tell me you weren't."
Lex swallowed. The confusion and pain in Helen's eyes when she saw her trashed office, which he still remembered all too well from when his inner darkness was controlling him, haunted him even more than her accusations. The accusations didn't hurt, since they were true, but they were a bit unexpected—he hadn't counted on Helen finding Martha Kent's medical record. He'd forgotten that he moved it there from his Room of Obsession.
Lex found himself unable to lie to Helen when she asked directly. "If you really believe I'm capable of that kind of deceit," he told her, "maybe you shouldn't be marrying me."
But she knew him. She knew he was skirting the issue, refusing to deny his crime. "Maybe you're right," she said.
And with that, she put down her wine glass and left the study.
He never came to join her in bed that night. He knew she wouldn't want to see him, and he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. He stared long and hard at the vial of blood, turning it over and over, cursing it.
"This isn't over."
He'd never hated this part of himself as much as he did tonight. "What do you suggest?"
"You need to get it analyzed."
He rolled his eyes. "What do I do about Helen?"
"Deny your involvement again," the voice told him, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "And this time, be a man about it."
It would be so easy. He could insist on his own innocence. He knew how to be crafty with his words. He could make her believe him. And they'd begin their marriage on a foundation of lies.
"Let me do the talking. It'll be easy."
No. He couldn't do it. That wasn't the kind of man Lex wanted to be. That was the kind of man his father was.
And for however brief a time he had control over his own actions, he would make the right choice.
A/N: This story has just a few more chapters to go, but the sequel is in the works.