Author: Sky Samuelle
Title: Damnation Becomes Us
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Characters belong to CW/DC comics
Summary: my response to the Lexana Fairytales challenge and a prequel to A Luthor Christmas Carol. There it goes a short peek into another moment of drama for the Luthor family.
Author Note: This fic has some potentially disturbing imagery, but I wanted to try something new.

Damnation Becomes Us

A lifetime ago, when Lana Luthor was still young and naïve Lana Lang, she remembered explaining her childhood sweetheart Whitney why out of all the fairytales her mum had told her while growing up, Snow White had always been the only one to scare her.

Whitney had laughed- it was so weird she could recall so clearly after more than a decade the way his blonde fringe used to fall all over his eyes when he shook his head in amusement, how he bellowed with laughter and told her that, if anything, she should have been more scared of Blue-Beard and his Seven Wives.

Strangely enough, Lana had been fascinated with the latter- maybe she had always had a secret taste for all things frightful and dark, whether she had been aware of it or not – but she had never been able to understand, even as she grew into an inquisitive teenager, what kind of prince would ever take the liberty of kissing an unconscious, deadly cold girl, after finding her glass coffin in the middle of the forest. Who cared how beautiful the Princess was? Morbid was morbid.

So it was deliciously ironic that at the sombre age of 34, Mrs Luthor found herself discovering a new sympathy for Prince Charming.

Some people were simply born to discover all their certainties could be disproved by adverse circumstances in various degrees of probability.

Checking her image in her pocket mirror, Lana was relieved but not excessively surprised to discover in her reflection an impeccable-looking woman. With her hair tied back tightly in a fashionable bun, faultless make-up and cold dark eyes, she appeared a mirage of distant, unapproachable beauty. She didn't look at all like a woman who hadn't had the courage to set foot in her house for a whole week, who hadn´t had a decent night of sleep for what it felt like an eternity.

It was a good thing, because she had appearances to keep up and worked hard to maintain a façade of normalcy in her current situation, but somehow her inability to exteriorise her distress in any way unnerved her.

Deep down, anxiety was a parasite which was eating at her from within. She wasn't unprepared for this, to manage crisis and face opponents on her own, but it had been a long time since she fought anything without Lex at her side. By an unspoken agreement, he had always been there to catch her before she could fall, no matter how well he pretended to leave her to her own devices.

Now it seemed it was her turn to rescue her husband from himself and Lana was desperate not to fail.

It was a modest consolation she wasn't completely on her own… Lex had taken care to prepare Mercy Graves for a similar eventuality –God bless his paranoia- and now the other woman was handling most of LuthorCorp-related issues while fabricating evidence of the Honduras business transaction Lex was allegedly involved in.

The only thing that Lana had to worry about was to find a way out. Because Lex Luthor, the man who was supposed never to get sick, had actually been in a coma for one week, plus two days and thirteen hours.

White as marble, he lay inside an aseptic, bare room at Level 33.1, his frame vaguely imposing under the fluorescent artificial lights, despite the many small IV tubes in his wrists and ankles and his nakedness underneath the plastic sheets.

The pallor of his complexion was so blatantly, disrespectfully unnatural that just looking at him was difficult: the tips of his fingers and nails had turned greyish and his veins looked like a blue-green net beneath his skin.

Yet, sitting there with him at night, helpless against those powerful tidal waves of panic crashing against her composure, was still better than coming home to their children, better than looking into their eyes and explaining with elaborate lies why she could not say when daddy was coming home .

There were only three people in this world she had trouble lying to: everyone else was nothing but a worthless and interchangeable decoration to her world of masks and puppets, a mindless audience to her eternal charade. So no, she wouldn't feed Lucine and Alex fake words of comfort. Their nanny could do that better… better than any distressed mother standing by a corpse-like father.

She couldn't lie to Lex either, using pretty speeches to conceal how the very sight of him chilled her now, to hide how she would prefer any other task to playing the casual helpless spectator to his slow decomposition, right here by his bedside. But she was out of alternatives. And so, she stood close to his bed, transfixed in spite of herself by his paper-thin, snowy-white skin, imagining the virus which was slowly eating him from within.

She was glad there had been no other tell-tale symptoms than her husband suddenly passing out in their limousine, in the middle of a toast after a gala soiree. For someone who no longer experienced illness, being powerless against the rebellion of his body must have been terrifying.

Perhaps they should have expected Braniac would retaliate sooner or later, considering the Luthors had ruined his plans of world domination more often than the Justice League during those last few years. Lex would have probably admired the sheer brilliance of the plan: engineering a virus aimed at specifically interacting with the DNA of a man with an invulnerable immune system required a certain ingeniousness, especially since Dr. Wong´s team was still searching for the source of the infection.

His wife didn't feel any compulsion to be so complimentary; engineering a suitable revenge sounded a lot better to her.

Lana observed her husband's body with critical eyes, feeling her panic subside as she splayed a well-manicured hand on his broad chest. Although he felt cold underneath her palm, the clammy softness of his skin reminded her he was flesh and bones, not the inanimate hard shell he could appear.

So she allowed her hand to wander, to follow the contours of his collarbone, the hollow of his throat, the cleft curve of his chin. She allowed her thumb to rub across his lips… actually Lex' s mouth had always been the most deceptively delicate-looking part of him…and the most dangerous.

Lana pointedly ignored both the warmth throbbing in her lower abdomen and the dampness on her cheeks; acknowledging them would have meant recognizing she was feeding on a desperate need to shed her clothing and touch him everywhere she could reach, to fight off the offending, invisible frost which was taking him away from her, day by useless day.

She refused to admit there might be a sound reason to be desperate.

As it was, she was barely half-aware of a guilty disappointment at the knowledge that she couldn't simply breathe life back into him with a kiss… or anything else. She fleetingly wondered if Isobel Theroux could have been capable of that.

Her shame died a quick, painless death when she remembered referring her inner debates over Snow White and her Prince Charming to Lex once.

They were both suffering a bout of insomnia, drinking a cup of tea in bed and making idle pillow talk without any hurry, pretending it wasn't the middle of night and they didn´t have an impossibly demanding schedule the following day.

Lex hadn't laughed. He had regarded her very seriously and nodded briefly, before he proceeded to explain why and how necrophilia had apparently held a powerful fascination for a few famous but doubtlessly mentally-deviated historical characters.

´Maybe damnation becomes us, my love,´ she pondered with a broken smile as she left a lingering kiss on his smooth head.

Drying her tears with the back of her hand, Lana chuckled and reached for her cell phone.

Lex had kept in touch with a college friend of his, Viktor Van Doom, and by the impression she had received on the few times she had met the man, he was deep enough into Occultism to put Isobel to shame.

Calling in old favours couldn't hurt.

THE END