The skyline might look the same from above, yet things were not necessarily as he remembered them now that he's on ground level. A bakery where a bank would be, a carwash and detailing parlor where his favorite Italian would be. Lex watched a blue late-model Ferrari reverse into the wash, watched the view disappear around the corner where a tobacconist would be but a florist occupied it instead.
Though the view was different, the lines of the roads and the turns were familiar. Three corners later, he was fairly certain where they were heading. Another corner and he would bet his entire holdings on their destination. He must've looked eager because Clark was looking at him fondly. It disconcerted him. Clark had never looked at him like this for a long time. Perhaps in the occasional dreams, though not recently.
As they turned another corner—and then three more corners, one more traffic light, Lex was willing to wager—he thought bitterly about how some people had it all to gain. Sure, the Lex of this timeline seemed to be a pushover, his employees seemed to have the license to take free potshots at his person.
Then there's Leona Luthor. He thought that Lionel Luthor was bad; but full of energy and menopausal ire, the female version should prove to be more unbearable in the long run. And she didn't seem to be heading to the grave anytime soon, unlike his own dearly departed dad. No wonder the Lex of this timeline was such a wet noodle. Old Lady Luthor must've gelded him upon reaching puberty.
But the Lex here had a Lilian, still very much alive with a sharp mind unclouded by depression and paranoia. More importantly the Lex here had Clark.
He didn't know what to make of it.
One more turn and they arrived at the doorstep of a familiar eatery, a favorite of his since his student days. A family establishment he hadn't manage to introduce to his own Clark. He was chagrined to learn that it existed here also. He wondered what this place stood for his counterpart. In his own Metropolis, the eatery was his refuge. Contrary to popular belief, his oasis of calm wasn't his penthouse, definitely not the mansion. Neither his office nor his swimming pool nor the fencing salon. Nor his many villas, and never his clubs now. It was just food. Good honest food to calm his soul.
He refused to blame this sentiment on any Kent. It would be unconscionable to give them that much credit.
A click and the door slid open, punctuated by a growl that could only come out from a farm-grown stomach. Big warm fingers wrapped around his forearm, tugging him out of the limo's warm interior and into the cold fall air. He stumbled, surprised by the force behind the urging, and fell straight across the narrow sidewalk directly inside.
The smell was familiar. Red gingham tablecloths felt like home.
The waitstaff was unfamiliar, the maitre d' was equally unknown to him. Neither cowering nor professionally cold, they fit the running theme of this world—friendly, sometimes discomfortingly so. Clark looked very much at home here, Lex noted, his bright red tie did not clash with the tablecloth as much as he thought it would.
Clark quizzed Lex on his experiments between pretzels and buttered bread. It set him on edge at first, his mind conjuring accusations beneath every single question. The question of "did you blow up anything?" got Lex snapping, and the question of "Who turned into a radioactive squid this time?" almost made the wine jug fly across the room.
Until now, he hadn't realized how bad his knee-jerk reaction was to such questions coming out of that mouth, uttered with that voice. Never mind those lighthearted inflections that accompanied Clark's words. He'd like to think that it was a defense mechanism, but they sounded whiny and hollow even to his ears. This was what Superman had reduced him to. The inability to argue something logically, instead letting knowledge go to bed with his reptilian brain and going for the kill.
It was as if a switch had been turned. Late afternoon sun gave way to thick clouds marching past the front shop-window, Clark's gestures became stilted and his many aborted attempts at another conversation were starting to make him look like a landed fish.
Lex doubted that the Clark of this world had to contend with so much hostility from a Lex Luthor. While Luthor and Superman traded kryptonite-laced barbs even before coffee in the morning and after brandy at night, he doubted the same thing happened here.
But maybe they had. For somewhere along the line Lex had become a Clarkian scholar, prodigiously able to read between the lines. Whatever it was, he thought those lessons might apply here too. So, he was probably not quite as surprised as he should when he saw the kind of raw hurt and confusion that passed this Clark's demeanor. It hadn't been all roses and sunshine in the land of metropolis-farmboy and wet-noodle billionaire, after all. Maybe they had come to the sort of mutual agreement, some burying of several hatchets that he never could with his own.
God forbid that he had to ruin this time line by exhuming old hurts. Destruction everywhere he went. That was another of his expertise.
Lex saw someone emerging from the kitchen door toward the back of the restaurant, and he waited for food to save them all. Later he could probably try and apologize, place the blame on lack of food and glucose crash for his short-temper.
But the waitress approached their table empty-handed. She headed straight to Clark with a harried look on her face.
Clark had probably seen enough of those looks, and Lex could imagine that it never translated well. He watched Clark stiffen, hands clenching and unclenching around his wine glass that was still miraculously intact.
"Mr. Kent," she said even when she's still five paces away from their table. The restaurant's main dining area was empty enough that her voice carried well. "There's General Lane on the house ph..."
The scrape of chair against marble drew a wince out of everyone. Lex barely caught Clark's "I knew it!" and almost didn't notice the we'll-talk-later look aimed directly at him. A gust of wind took Clark away in a blink of an eye, but Lex was more interested in the waitress's complete nonchalance. Like this had happened a million time. And they accused him of Houdini acts.
"Do you still want to eat in, or shall I box up both your meals to go?" she asked, after the proverbial dust had cleared.
The driver took many boxes of food from the hands of a concerned maitre d' and placed them somewhere inside the limo with practiced urgency. Lex didn't even get a chance to arrange himself properly in his seat before it sped away. Considering that he had enough indignities happening through the day, he stubbornly kept quiet. He promised himself that he would give the Lex of this place a good talking-to about all and sundry taking liberties.
In the end, he had no choice but to trust these people. The decisive way each corner was taken and each traffic light narrowly missed told him that the driver knew where to go even as Lex didn't. It wasn't the most comfortable feeling in the world. He used to want to trust people, many eons ago. Now he just wanted to...
Well, he didn't know what exactly, but he'll figure it out.
They pulled to a stop just outside a ring of people pressing themselves against hornet-colored barricades. It parked next to an official-looking black car with it's driver's door ajar and an official-looking person leaning against the steering wheel talking into his wrist.
The man saw them, slid out and hurried towards them. Much sooner than he had anticipated, Lex felt the sudden chill as his door whooshed open.
"Mr Luthor," the man greeted, eyes behind shades, white faced, white wrinkled shirt, tie with a half-windsor knot and little white golf balls on a sea of green polyester. "This way please."
Lex eyed the man warily. If they're going to shoot and hide the body...
"Mr Kent told us that you'll look at the programming of that thing," a jerk of the head, a subtle point towards the sky. Look, look up to the sky! The finger said without actually explaining anything. "Ms Graves and Ms Taya will be along shortly. They're checking the perimeters with our people."
Lex was rooted on his seat. He tilted his head up to the sky, found nothing but blue with fluffy white, a few power lines criss-crossing his line of vision. What was it that he was supposed to be looking at? Lex jogged his memory, tried to think of his own experiments that might have a twin here. He was aware of the officer hovering impatiently by his door, the driver's half-twisted body angled towards him, all eyes on him expectantly.
Outside of the shell of his car, a growing buzz. The sky refused to reveal its secrets. A slight nudge at his elbow. "General Lane's waiting for you, Sir."
