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“I will never become my father,” Lex said, getting into Clark’s space even though that had never intimidated him the way it does others. “I would never sacrifice you or anybody I cared about to bring him down.”
Clark just stared back at him, probably wondering if Lex was trying to convince himself just as much. Frustrated by his own hurt feelings and Clark’s goddamned stubbornness, Lex finally turned away.
“Lex… why does your father hate you so much?”
Lex paused, hand on the railing, feeling like he’d been punched in the chest. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had said it so boldly. People would call his father cruel. Distant. Self-serving. Conniving. Evil. Plenty of things that Lionel certainly deserved. But he didn’t think anyone had actually admitted to seeing what had always been obvious to Lex: that his father did not, and would never, really love him. He resented him for being the one to live. Lex had been the one to destroy his father’s vision, his dream of the perfect family. He hated him for a childhood accident, and always would. Probably almost as much as Lex hated himself. No one had ever wanted to be the one to accuse Lionel of, among his many other unforgivable crimes, hating his own son. Or possibly, and maybe more likely, no one cared enough about Lex to see it, to give a shit if his father loved him or not. But Clark saw. Clark saw everything. Clark cared.
He stood there with his hand on the railing until he could be sure Clark wouldn’t hear the emotion in his voice. “Take care of yourself, Clark.”
He made it as far as the landing before the memory hit with almost no warning, just like the others. He had seconds where he managed to grip the railing with both hands, hoping like hell that he wouldn't pass out like he did in his father’s office, and then he was yanked out of reality into the past.
The house is dark, quiet. It’s late. He’s in his pajamas and robe, carrying a tray up the stairs, carefully, so nothing spills. He made it look beautiful. Maybe she’ll eat something when she sees how nice he made it look. He can almost hear her voice, exhausted, but grateful. ‘Thank you, Alexander, this is lovely.’ The baby is crying, the sound trickling through the hallway and down the stairs, where the uncontrollable sound of his wailing echoes off the walls. He cries a lot, but babies do that, Lex knows. They don’t have any other way to tell you what they want. Lex hears it now as muted background noise, aware of it, but no more bother to his ears than a television turned up too loud in another room. It’ll be all right. He can hold Julian again while his mother eats, and maybe he’ll stop crying and go back to sleep, and then both of them will rest. And when his father comes home, he’ll be happy, because it will be peaceful. He’ll tell Lex he did a good job.
As he reaches the landing, the crying abruptly stops, and Lex’s heart goes still. When Julian stops crying, it’s slower. Like someone turning the volume down on the television. Not like someone has turned off the power. He places the tray on the sill and begins to run.
His mother is standing over the crib, where Julian is silent. The silence feels louder than the crying, somehow, and Lex knows something is terribly, unfixably wrong. “Mom?” His voice sounds shaky. She doesn’t move. “Mom!”
At last she turns. She’s holding a pillow, and drops it on the floor. She is smiling, her face shining with tears, and Lex feels his stomach turn. Please, don’t let it be real…
“What did you do?” He goes toward her, still holding onto the crumb of hope that she’s about tell him everything’s all right, and Julian is sleeping now, and Lex will look down in the crib and see his brother’s tiny chest expand and contract with breath, and his mother will hug him and tell him how much she loves them both. Even as he feels himself wishing for it, desperately, more than he’s ever wished for anything in his life, he knows it won’t be true. She holds a finger to her lips as she comes closer.
“Shh, don’t wake the baby,” she says in a dazed whisper. “He’s sleeping.”
Lex forces himself to look into the crib. He already knows what he’ll see. But he has to be sure. “No,” he says, in a horrified whisper. The feelings inside him as he looks at Julian— his tiny, helpless little brother— defy definition. “No…” The tears fill his eyes, saliva filling his mouth. Something new joins the shock and grief that hold his chest like a vice. Fear. He could lose his mother, too, if his father were angry enough. “What about Dad?”
He can’t begin to imagine his father’s reaction.
“Shh,” his mother says again. “Dad has nothing to worry about, sweetheart.” She kisses Lex on the forehead. Lex wants to throw up. “Julian’s happy now.”
When he came to, back in the present, standing in Clark’s barn with his knuckles turning white and his heart pounding, Lex had no idea how long it had been. He heard Clark’s footsteps behind him. So, long enough, he supposed.
“Lex? Are you all right?”
The worry in Clark’s voice was so familiar, Lex could almost feel his heart breaking all over again. He wished he could turn around and let Clark see.
He had to get out of there.
“Yeah,” he said dully. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
His movements as he made his way down the rest of the stairs and out the barn door felt robotic, like someone else was controlling his body and he was trapped inside it watching it happen. He got outside, where the sun felt like it was mocking him, the soft breeze and birdsounds like knives against his skin and ears; he couldn’t breathe, everything was too loud, too much, too alive, and how could this beautiful world let something like that happen, let him spend all those years thinking it was his own fault? He didn’t realise he’d fallen to his knees, retching, his hands on the ground, blades of grass cool against his palms, gripping handfuls of it, dirt collecting under his fingernails. He vomited a watery stream of bile onto the living earth, polluting the Kents’ beautiful farm with more Luthor filth. He heard a new sound that after a few seconds he recognised as his own voice, sobbing.
“Lex!”
Clark was there, warm hand on his back, kneeling next to him in the dirt. “Don’t—” Lex tried to say, but he couldn’t breathe, and he was retching again, his body wracked with sobs and the heaving of his stomach. Clark shouldn’t have to see him like this.
“Hold on,” Clark said, “I’ll be right back, I promise.”
I promise. How many times had they said those words to each other? How many times had they actually been true?
He managed to move himself away from the vomit before it trickled through the dirt onto his hands or clothes. Clark returned after just moments, or maybe it was longer— Lex couldn’t tell, he was still dizzy and confused— getting his tie and jacket off and wrapping a blanket around him, picking him up with his farmboy’s strength, the ease of someone who tossed bales of hay around like they were pillows. He carried him like a child back up to the loft, where he placed him on the couch and sat down beside him. Lex was still shaking. “Look at me,” Clark said. Lex did. His eyes were soft pools of determination. “Breathe.”
Clark breathed slowly, in, out, as if he were teaching someone who’d never had lungs before how to do it. Lex tried to match it, and began to feel like he could finally get air again. Gradually his body stopped shaking, and his confusion subsided, but then embarrassment started to set in, and he felt a new need to escape. He simply didn’t have the energy to do it. “I’m all right, Clark.”
“No, you’re not,” he said firmly. He reached to the table beside him and picked up a glass of something, pressing it into Lex’s hand. Lex didn’t have the capacity to wonder where it’d come from. His mouth tasted awful and his tongue was dry, so he took a sip. It was only water, but something in it gave his senses a jolt— lemon and salt, he realised. To his annoyance, it was actually helping.
“This whiskey sour tastes like shit,” he joked after a moment or two, taking another sip. Clark gave him a reluctant smile.
“What happened? Did you remember something?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t tell me what to worry about after what I just saw outside!”
Lex didn’t flinch. He was used to the quickness of Clark’s anger. “If you ever figure out how to mind your own goddamn business—”
“Said like someone who hasn’t been breathing down my neck trying to learn whatever terrible dark secret you think the Kent family is hiding—”
“Well, it wasn’t anything about you, if that’s your concern. Whatever it is you don’t want me to know, I still don’t.”
“Come on, you know that’s not what I was asking.” But he faltered a little.
“Isn’t it?” Lex stared at him coldly.
“Lex! I’m only trying to—”
“—help,” Lex finished wearily. “I know. You’re always just trying to help, Clark.” He felt like he’d aged twenty years in the past ten minutes. He sighed. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But remember, you wanted to know.”
Clark’s face softened back into concern. Lex looked away. God, he hated how much he still loved Clark.
He explained as simply as he could, his eyes focused on a corner of the loft’s window as he did, not wanting to watch Clark’s expression change as he learned exactly how fucked up the Luthor family was. When he was done, he took another sip of his drink.
“Lex,” Clark said softly. He moved closer. “That’s… I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine… all those years…”
“I thought I’d be saving my mother from my father’s wrath, if he thought that I…” He no longer felt like crying, which was a relief, but he still couldn’t bring himself to look at Clark. He shook his head. “No wonder I’d blocked it out.”
His mother, in her delusion, had thought it better for Julian to die than to grow up with the kind of father Lionel had been to Lex. It occurred to him to consider whether, had Lionel known the truth, their grief might have been shared. Whether Julian’s death might have brought them closer together rather than further apart. “Now you know,” Lex finished. “Why my father hates me.”
Silently, Clark’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, rubbing his bicep with his hand. Lex didn’t move away, mostly because he was too exhausted, but also because he didn’t really want to. They sat for a minute.
“Do you wanna know what I saw, before you pulled me out of the tank?”
Surprised, Lex turned to look at him, finally. He set his glass down and waited. It was Clark who looked away first, glancing down before he spoke again.
“I saw my mother. My birth mother,” Clark specified, unnecessarily. Lex felt his forehead crease.
“You must’ve been so— so young,” he said. Clark had only been two or three when the Kents adopted him. Clark nodded. “What’d you see?”
“Not much,” he admitted. Lex didn’t care if it was the truth or not just then. “But I got to learn her name. See her face.” He smiled a little. “She was beautiful.”
“Knowing what you look like, she’d have to be,” Lex said, and then bit his tongue. What was he doing? But Clark just smiled, the bashful little one that always appeared when he was offered compliments. “What was her name?”
“Lara,” he said quietly, like it was a priceless coin he held in his mouth.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Lex replied, which is what he would have said even if her name were Brunhilde or Skeletor or something. But it actually was a nice name. “I’m sorry she never got the chance to know you.”
Clark nodded slowly. They were still touching. “Lex, I… I never thanked you. For saving my life at Summerholt.”
“Well, you know I owed you one. Or three. I don’t know exactly. I’d have to check my logs,” he joked, and Clark laughed a little, and then he was looking at Lex almost like he was seeing him for the first time. Or seeing something for the first time. His hand came to Lex’s cheek.
“I’m not keeping score.”
There was only a second before it happened in which Lex realised it was actually about to happen, and then Clark’s mouth was on his. His lips were soft and warm— how was he always so warm— and Lex felt himself shrugging his arm free of the blanket, reaching for him. They clung to one another just like they had at Summerholt, the desperation to live, to protect, still burning within them. Their mouths opened to each other, bodies shifting to get closer together, and all at once Lex understood that the desire to know what Clark was hiding from him no longer came from a place of entitlement, of betrayal, but only a desire to know all that Clark was. He knew that the love he felt for Clark wasn’t healthy, wasn’t normal; sometimes he wished he could unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole, but maybe… maybe this was enough. To know that this was the kind of person Clark was. A person who would save his life, no questions asked, as many times as necessary. A young man full of deep feelings. A person whose morality ruled his heart, who cared so much he’d put himself in danger if he thought it would help someone else.
A boy who would never know his dead mother. A man who wanted to believe, even amid seemingly constant evidence to the contrary, that other people, deep down in their souls, wanted to be good.
Clark pulled Lex on top of him as he lay back on the couch, the blanket falling off Lex onto the floor, fitting their bodies together, his hands against Lex’s back. Lex knew this dance— was pretty good at this dance, actually— and even though he wasn’t sure this was precisely the right time, he let Clark lead him a little longer, kissing Clark’s neck as it was presented to him, letting Clark’s fingers slip under his shirt to touch his bare skin.
Eventually Lex managed to slow things down, trailing his lips along his jaw and back to his mouth, tapering off until he pulled away with one last, soft kiss on the lips. Clark’s eyes opened again. “Why’d you stop?”
Lex rubbed his jaw with his thumb. “I think we both need time to think.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Clark exhaled through his nose, and Lex swung his leg off the couch, adjusting himself a little in his clothing once he was standing. Clark sat up and did the same. “You should talk to your father, I guess.”
“I should.” Lex spotted his jacket and tie on the back of the chair. He put the jacket on and stuffed the tie into one of the pockets. “Though in the future, I’d appreciate it if you'd wait until you don’t have an erection before you mention my father.”
“Sorry.” Clark bit his lip and got up, following Lex to the barn window. “Do you think it would’ve been different?” he asked, gently. “I mean, if you’d both known…?”
“Can leopards change their spots?” Lex gave him a rueful smile. “Who knows, Clark? In some ways, sure. It would’ve been different. But since I don’t actually know what it would take for someone who thinks love has to be earned…”
Clark was quiet. Lex didn’t blame him. It must’ve been hard for someone who’d grown up with parents like Jonathan and Martha Kent to understand how someone like Lionel Luthor could be considered a father.
“In any case,” Lex went on, more lightly, “if things were different I might never have ended up back in Smallville. And then you and I might never have become friends.”
Clark looked up at him and smiled. “Are we?” he asked. “Still friends, I mean?”
Lex inched his fingers closer to Clark’s hand on the windowsill until he could cover it with his own. “I’d like to think so.” It wasn’t quite the answer Clark was looking for, judging by his face, but it was the best Lex could do for the time being. “I’d like to think I could be the kind of man Clark Kent would be proud to call a friend.”
Lex turned them to face each other and kissed him once more on the mouth. Clark wanted to draw him into another, he could tell, but he let go of Clark’s hand and squeezed his upper arm before making once again for the stairs.
“Lex.” Clark’s voice made him turn halfway down the stairs. Clark stood at the top of the railing, looking over. “You don’t… you don’t have to earn it.”
There was an earnestness to it that was almost desperate, and Lex smiled up at him with his heart aching. Clark not really getting it only made Lex love him more.
“For you? Yes, I do.” Clark might not have understood exactly what this meant, but he undoubtedly heard the determination in Lex’s voice, and he let it go with a nod.
“Don’t worry, Clark. I’ll be back.” Lex started down the stairs again. “I promise.”