Chapter Text
CLARK
He’d run out of time.
It could be hours or it could be days. A week at most, and that was if he got really lucky. Soon, Lex would have a hold of the secret that would give him complete and utter control of Clark. All of his abilities could be turned to bludgeon the fragile Earth into submission – all at Lex’s whim. The people he loved. The people he didn’t even know, but who didn’t deserve to die.
And now Chloe Sullivan, his oldest, most reliable friend, who kissed him when they were in eighth grade and kissed him again when she thought the world might end, wanted him to kill Lex.
Lex, who he’d never gotten to kiss, who wasn’t a friend at all anymore.
‘Gotten to’ might've been a strange turn of phrase to an eavesdropper tiptoeing through Clark’s mind, but it wasn’t at all for the man who lived there day in and day out. Clark knew, at least in some rough charcoal outline, what was between him and Lex…had come to know, through the wretched trials of time and painful dreams. Ones where he kissed Lex endlessly under water and it was so good he forgot to drag him to shore at all. There was a burning in his chest, but it wasn't a desperation for oxygen, it was a need to fuse the two of them together at their root, atomic levels. Lex’s eyes were closed, but Clark never understood that was dead until he’d woken up.
Not to mention those inappropriate realizations, cued by some offhanded comment of Lois’ as she ran a nonstop dissertation on What People Were Like out of the side of her mouth, that gave him a stitch in his side. Watching helplessly as one tiny idea recontextualized everything he thought he knew about he and Lex, hidden in the bathroom and trying not to make the drywall shake in its studs by breathing in too hard, too fast.
Clark knew that he had feelings for Lex. Probably every feeling under the sun, he had it. Love, lust, anger, hate, guilt, hope, grief.
He would never get the Lex he’d known back. That much was clear. Lex had thrown Lionel off a building. He’d done unspeakable things to Lana, things that still made Clark shake to think about.
So why the reluctance? He couldn’t claim it was only out of distaste for taking a life. Probably Chloe was right. And Oliver, and everyone else if he cared to ask them. He should bite the bullet, perform the regretful hero’s duty, and take Lex out. Save the world some grief, right?
After all, he knew what it could come to. He remembered his vision of Lex as president, clad all in white with missile codes at his itching fingertips, all too well. And that tremendous coldness that had taken up permanent residence in his eyes.
It wasn’t like he’d been trying to save Lex lately.
Maybe, with all the dumb stubbornness of a bull that knows it’s been bred solely for the dance and then the slaughter, he was just hoping Lex might…come around. See the error of his ways?
Maybe he was only hoping it wouldn’t come to this. Because as long as Lex was still breathing, there was the semblance of a possibility that something could still change. God knows their friendship was at best recalcitrantly dead, always trying to rise up from its grave at the slightest provocation before expiring again just as rapidly.
But there could be none of that, not anymore. He was out of time.
He paused to consider what Lex would do with him if he had control over him as he thumbed over the lead-lined box Chloe had left on his desk. It was something he’d pondered many times over the years, every time he thought about telling Lex his secret. What would Lex do with powers like that at his beck and call? How long would he have resisted the temptation to do something wrong and irreversible, and by the time he did, would he even know it was wrong? Or would he saunter down that bloody path with blind abandon, spouting off about ends and their justified means, like always?
No. He couldn’t let Lex have him. How many cave paintings and prophecies about the conquest of good over evil did a poor schmuck have to read to get it through his head? It was all over.
And not just Lex. Lately it felt like everything was over. Once he’d taken care of Lex, all that would be left was one big gaping void. Nothing to fill it but the destiny that he didn’t even know if he wanted all that much.
Because it wasn’t just Lex on the line. Lana, too, was gone, and gone, and gone. She was gone because they’d split up: not one quick clean shatter, but a slow rending of things apart. Peeling back layers and layers that they’d laid on thick all these years, so they could barely even recognize what was underneath peeking back at them. How could you move on from ‘I wish you wouldn’t look at me like you hadn’t seen me before,’ and the long silence stretching itself out and yawning after ‘I just need to know that you love me, no matter what?’
Let alone, teary-eyed, ‘Do you have any idea how it feels to wake up every morning knowing that you’re going to fail in the eyes of the only person you’ve ever really loved?’
It wasn’t just that she couldn’t tell him apart from that wraith wearing his face. How was he meant to get past how happy the phantom had made her, and how he sensed the lightness in her step fading the second he got home? She’d been planning to leave Smallville, had been excited to. She’d wanted that for years. Had he been the one dragging her back and holding her here, the lead weight around her ankle?
If she’d stayed in Paris, Brainiac would never have taken her so totally from everyone. Away from him, away from herself. His throat clenched, thinking of her hollow filmy eyes. Her total nonresponsivity to his voice, or his hand taking hers. And he had no idea how to bring her back.
In another way, she’d been gone long before any of this started, the second that Lex was done with her. The girl he’d found talking to her parents in the graveyard all those years ago, who’d served him bad cappuccinos and lingered in his barn at sunset, was…an echo at best.
Lex turned her into a monster, he thought in his worst moments.
I pushed her onto a pedestal so high the only way she could come down was to plummet and crash, he thought in his other kind of worst moments.
And she wasn’t coming back. Because Lana liked the mastery she’d gained, the control over situations and ability to twist them. She looked at home in her skin in a way he couldn’t say she had before, settled and strong, even if a little wicked at times. She knew who she was now, even if it was someone Clark couldn’t bear to look at for too long.
When they agreed they were better off apart, she’d finally told him everything Lex had done to her. The pregnancy, the miscarriage, the lies. She said it with a strange air, like she was cautioning him about what Lex was capable of for his own sake, rather than pleading her case.
At first he only felt nauseous. He held her for a while, told her how sorry he was he’d ever let something like that happen to her. He wiped away the tear that threatened embarrassingly to escape at superspeed, so he wouldn’t make the moment about himself. He wasn’t sure why it hit him so hard: was it that she’d hidden it so well until now, that Lex could really do that to someone he was meant to love, or something else entirely?
After she left, he wanted to pummel Lex into the ground until he bled. That, at least, was an old impulse. It had been since Lex’s slip ups began, and all the people he used up for his experiments, left dead or maimed or insane. And even more since he took Lana from Clark. But there, he couldn’t plead complete innocence. A vast swathe of his anger arose from the fact that that Lex had picked someone vastly younger, a friend who looked up to him, and had put everything on the line to manipulate her into thinking they could be in love. (Only to hurt her like that.)
He picked Lana.
Why didn’t he pick Clark?
Clark would have been easy to convince in questions of love.
He could have had Clark.
All he would’ve had to do was push at the right times, a little then a lot, hard then soft. And maybe pull, once, twice, three time’s the charm.
He could’ve spared Lana, and he could’ve had Clark. But of course, then it wouldn’t be history as we know it.
Even now, he isn’t sure whether it’s because Lex thought that’s what would hurt the most, or whether it was because Lex really fell for Lana. And that he’d never fallen for Clark.
There was some possibility that Lex wanted him. There was obsession, there were long glances, there was an inability to let go. Lex was like the cat in that bluesy kid’s song: no matter how you tried to get rid of him, he came right back the very next day. For a long time Clark had taken that for granted, that Lex would always creep back in trying to mend things. He guessed those times were over.
Lex might feel something with all the intensity, all the swirling confusion, of love or want or need for him. Lex might even believe it was love. But it might not be: there were no guarantees in a mind like Lex Luthor’s. And now he’d probably never know.
Clark swallowed and flipped up the lid of the box. A red meteor rock bracelet gleamed proudly in the midst of the black velvet.
Last time he’d been exposed to red kryptonite, he’d told Lex, ‘If I’d have known who you were gonna turn out to be, I never would have saved you on that bridge.’
He guesses if he puts the bracelet on, he’ll make good on that wish. He’ll…incapacitate Lex somehow, even if he doesn’t kill him.
God, he could kill him.
It was strange. Now, he couldn’t feel any of the unbridled rage that had lived in him from when Lex made himself irredeemable, from the days Lex and Lana first started orbiting one another. It was all blank inside: all he had was hesitation.
The wedding wasn’t the day he’d hated Lex the most. No, it was the tunnels, after he’d gone in to save Lex and Lex had pulled him out of the rubble. And it was because he knew then that Lex still had it in him to be good, he just wasn’t going to make the effort. It broke something in him, to know that.
His old dreams returned after that, but they were changed. They were still under water in that river; he still kissed Lex. But Lex’s blue eyes were piercing and black, and Clark’s hand was snaked around his throat to hold him there, choking him. Lex would laugh at him in between kisses, even as he got weaker and feebler in Clark’s iron grasp. Clark would dive down and shove him onto the wet sand at the bottom of the river, pinning him there, the action sending strange sparks flying through his stomach. He would always wake up the second he bit Lex’s lip and saw that tiny red stream of blood start to flow.
So yeah. If Clark put that band around his wrist, he could kill Lex.
He rubbed his temples, feeling old beyond his years. He was all out of choices, really, but he knew that if he did this, it had to be his choice alone.
What was that Bible verse that the street preacher outside the Daily Planet was always rattling on about? When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.
In the blink of an eye, Clark’s fastened the bracelet around his wrist. How fast do you have to run, to outrun regret?
Clark entered the mansion silently. As if it were like any other occasion he’d crossed the threshold, and there were no troublesome strings of fate tightening around his throat. There will be no second chances at this: he can’t afford to back down. He slowed when he heard Lex’s breathing through the wall, a sudden rush dizzying him. His blood leapt in his veins, hot like lava, eager for something even the volcanoes can’t remember the name of.
Lex sat in his armchair, head tipped back, brandy sloshing precariously to one side of a thick-rimmed glass. The whole thing was unusually careless for him. Papers and briefcases and tools were laid out in a mess across the whole room, but the only light was candlelight.
Clark waited for him to notice him, getting a little thrill out of the jolt of fear that ran through his eyes.
“Clark.”
The silence felt like crushed velvet stuffing his jaws. As tantalizing as it was suffocating, and so, so ready to be torn apart by tooth and claw.
“Won’t you tell me why you’ve come here?”
“That’s easy, Lex.” Clark prowled closer across the length of the sleek hardwood floor. “I’ve come to take care of you.” What a different meaning those words could once have carried.
Lex’s eyes narrowed.
If he were better at intimidation tactics, Clark would have let the sentence hang. It was the wondering that really drove the fear in deep, the ambiguity, the hope it could mean anything else. But he wanted to see the hurt look that slides across Lex’s face when he laid out the cold, unvarnished truth.
“Once and for all,” he added, clenching his hands into fists where they hang by his sides.