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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.

Chapter Text

LEX

Lex was at his lowest. The quest for control over the Traveller, for its true identity: they were the single thread suspending him. Rock bottom looked awfully desolate.

He’d assumed he wouldn’t miss Lionel, or that if he did, it would stay comfortably locked in a box a thousand leagues deep. But right now he missed anyone who’d ever known him, ever held some modicum of closeness to him. He really did have nothing. His life was an empty sarcophagus, dust already swirling up to embrace him no matter how he tried to wave it away with visions of greatness.

Maybe he’d gone too far. Maybe he’d done something really wrong. God knew the burning guilt in his gut was telling him so, even though he railed against it. For everything the old man had done to him, he deserved it. If anyone deserved it, he did.

The brandy just wasn’t cutting it. Thinking back on old vices, he already knew coke or molly or inflicting casual cruelty on those who’d once wronged him wouldn’t cut it.

Well, maybe one old habit might.

His eyes fluttered closed, thinking about it. He hadn’t indulged in years. Now the urge came up, scratchy and insistent, under his skin.

Luthors were ordained to bring others to heel, to be the inflictors of pain. A predilection for submission and the receiving of pain was grossly unacceptable.

Unfortunately, Lex loved it, in a way that carved him up,  deep and unknowable, allowing nothing else to reach it. For a few hours, he could become the antithesis of everything he was supposed to be. He could be a mouth for someone to use, soft flesh to be exploited but above all desired. There was a freedom to it, one you couldn’t fight even if you wanted to. He could turn off the perpetual motion machine of his mind and be stripped down to the bare tacks of sensation.

Paradoxically, for all that Lionel had inflicted on him growing up, he liked being slapped, liked the sharp flat shock and resounding sting of it against his cheek. Maybe it was because at the bottom of it, he controlled when he wanted it and when he didn’t. It never came out of left field, no horrible, unpredictable beatdowns. Just something he was asking for, for his own satisfaction.

More likely, though, it was because at the end of it, he would be good. No matter how the ‘punishment’ started, or how much he knew he probably really deserved it, by the end of it he would’ve earned his way back to something higher. They’d collapse together, sticky and sated. The good ones would stroke his face, clean him up, and he’d know that he’d brought pleasure. He’d know without a shadow of a doubt, for one moment, that he was good for something. Just him – even without the trappings of power his father urged him to bolt into his very bones and sinews.

It was too risky to engage in often. Lex barely ever found someone he could trust enough to sleep with, to let into his goddamn living room, let alone someone to dominate him. And any evidence of his particular inclinations could tank his reputation and everything he’d worked so hard to achieve – faster, ironically, than his numerous human rights violations in the course of LuthorCorp’s more sordid dealings.

But now, he craved it. Funny – he was on the verge of an enormous discovery. He should be fired up. He would be, if it hadn’t taken everything to get here. If he hadn’t burned every bridge he’d ever crossed. No man is an island, Lex. That was what his father used to say. That wasn’t the case, though, and he yearned for someone to come and take him in deep, choke him out and let him float in that beautiful space where nothing mattered but the inches between them and how best to close them, how best to obey.

*

When he came to his senses, Clark looked like a dark avenging angel standing in his doorway. He held himself with a strange poise, one that Lex, unfortunately, recognized.

“Clark.” A long pause, in which he tried to wet the sawdust of his throat with a swallow. “Won’t you tell me why you’ve come here?”

“That’s easy, Lex.” Clark’s voice was smooth caramel, but there was poison melted through it. “I’ve come to take care of you.”

Wouldn’t that be a neat trick.

“Once and for all,” Clark clarified.

Oh. So it was this. He hadn’t, for the life of him, really expected this.

“Clark Kent has come to kill me?” Lex mused.

“Mm-hmm,” Clark purred.

He’d gotten closer and closer, and stood not five paces from Lex, with all the potential energy required to devastate a small city thrumming through his frame.

“It’s your own fault, you know,” he whispered.

With a sudden blast of air, he stood right at Lex’s side, and lifted him up by the scruff of the neck. “You little shit,” he murmured.

Lex yelped. His thoughts scattered in all directions at once. How best to get away from Clark. What could possibly have led Clark to this moment. How hard he wouldn’t fight, if he wasn’t almost on the cusp of uncovering Veritas’ last mystery.

“They want me to kill you,” Clark intoned, sounding almost pained. With a simple swing of his arm, he hurled Lex down on the floor. Lex jerked and hissed at the impact juddering through his bones.

“You couldn’t leave well enough alone,” Clark moaned, crowding into his space and curling his fingers roughly around his jaw.

Lex knew better than to move. But he was really starting to wonder what was wrong with Clark. If it was a drug habit, or some odd Jekyll and Hyde act, how had it escaped his notice all those years, with only those few strange instances?

“And now they want me to kill you. And I –” Clark laughed, panting harshly, “– have to do it. I never wanted to kill you, Lex.”

Clark scratched his nails up Lex’s skin, hard, from his collarbone across his jugular. Lex’s blinks came at about a mile a minute.

“Clark –” he garbled out. He had to try to reason with him. He couldn’t let Clark do this. He was too close to his life finally achieving some sort of meaning. And Clark would never survive carrying out his murder, not intact.

“Don’t fucking say my name,” Clark retorted. Then his voice got softer, before it started to shake. “There were a lot of things that I might have wanted. This wasn’t one of them.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Lex rasped. “I’m not your enemy.”

“You are,” Clark answered. “You made yourself my enemy.”

“I don’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lex pleaded, only it sounded like every desperate conversation he’d had in his head, the ones he was never been brave enough to have with Clark.

Clark stilled, then, and dropped him abruptly. “I want to talk to Alexander.”

“What?” Lex reeled, his center of gravity all off-kilter without Clark’s steely grasp hauling him onto his toes.

“Don’t play dumb. I was in your mind. You saw me, you know. I want to talk to him.”

Lex should have lied. Nothing could really explain why he didn’t lie.

“I killed him. All that’s left is me.”

Clark let out a low groan, like he was the one hurting. “No. No.”

“I shoved him in the fire,” Lex snarled. Why hadn’t he moved yet, drawn back, recouped the tactical advantage?

In one nod, Clark transformed into the picture of a grim executioner. “I see. I’m gonna…I’m gonna make you pay for that.”

Lex scrabbled backwards, but it was too late.

Clark grabbed his shoulders and pulled him in. “You do know,” he said in a low voice. “That now there’s nothing holding me back.”

Lex shivered. He’d like to claim it was only fear stealing its way up his spine, interfering with his higher cognitive functions.

“Do you have any idea how badly I’ve wanted to hurt you?” Clark asked, casually cruel, conversational.

“No,” Lex replied, jaw tilted up in something that wasn’t quite defiance. “Why don’t you tell me.”

There was still a way out of this. He just had to keep looking for it, keep rolling with it until an escape hatch presented itself.

Lex did have an idea, actually. Clark had told him as much, first when he was sickened with silver meteor rock, then at his trainwreck of an engagement party to Lana. And he’d told him a thousand other times without words. How he wished Clark only wanted to hurt his body. That, he could’ve warmed to.

Clark Kent liked to think he was a paragon of virtue. But Lex could bring the ugly things squirming out from under his skin. He tried to take pride in that, at least, like he’d settled for Lana’s obsession over her love.

Instead of telling him, Clark punched him. Lex hit the floor again, dizzy and tasting blood in his mouth. He was going to have a black eye, if he lived.

“They’re making me lose you,” Clark whined.

Lex reached his hands up to fight back, but Clark’s fists are windmilling into his sides, pounding him into a breathless agony.

“You’re making me lose you,” Clark growled. “You could be good, but you don’t fucking care. You’d rather ruin yourself, rather ruin everything!”

With the lethal grace of a bird of prey mid-dive, Clark rolled him onto his front and yanked his arms behind his back, pinning his wrists together. Lex moaned at the pain, the tendons in his shoulders wrenching far past the point of no return, his forehead dropping to the cool floorboards.

For a moment, no more blows reigned down.

“You were my friend,” Clark hissed in his ear. “And you’ve killed everything I loved about you. And now it’s left to me to finish the job.”

Clark straddled Lex’s hips and grabbed his throat again, pulling his back up into an arch that felt like it could crumble his vertebrae. “Why the fuck would you leave it to me to finish the job, Lex?”

Lex couldn’t reply. The edges of his vision were going black, much more rapidly than he thought they would. His throat clenched, the lack of oxygen sending his brain spinning away to destinations unknown. Clark sounded like he was going to cry.

Lex came back to himself with Clark’s hand under his face and his weight pressing Lex into the floor. His legs thrown on top of Lex’s legs. His arms blanketing Lex’s arms.

“You don’t get to tap out on me yet,” Clark said, voice tight.

Lex took one last, desperate shot in the dark. “Y-you said there were things you wanted.”

All he could hear from Clark was a sudden, sharp intake of breath.

“Don’t you want them now?”

Set the fuse, wait for the fire. Honestly, he had no fucking clue what Clark was talking about. But he was happy to take the risk that it was something worse than just killing him straight away. He’d do anything to prolong this wretched excuse of a life now that it came down to it, huh?

The weight on top of him receded. When he turned around, scooting back on his knees with his arms outstretched to stop Clark from getting close again, he was confronted with a picture of stillness. Contemplation, in Clark’s shadowy eyes. Like he’d wet an appetite he didn’t even know existed.

Clark swallowed. “You always were a good ideas man, Lex.”

“So,” Lex prompted, braver than he feels. “What was it? That you wanted so much?”

Clark crooned from the back of his throat, “You’re not going to get it all.”

Clark frightened Lex more now than he had when he was threatening to kill him. The perilous softness hanging over his features promised violent delights before his untimely, and also violent, end.

“Get on your feet.” Clark commanded coldly, rising up himself.

Swaying, Lex obeyed. He could hear himself panting. Run, now. You could run.

Clark stalked up to him and slapped him in the face. Once, twice. Distantly, Lex thought his lip must be bleeding from it already.

“You don’t get it all, because some things are childish. And when you’re grown, you have to put away childish things.”

Clark kneed him in the gut, and when he buckled, he pressed Lex down, kept him bent there over his knee.

“I would’ve been soft with you. Once,” he said, voice ringing out almost mournfully. “I wanted to.”

Lex still didn’t understand.

For all the scraping, bruising jabs Clark began to mete out to his back, his legs, his sides, there was something strange about them.

It wasn’t that Lex wasn’t fighting back. He couldn’t: it was like drowning, where helpless thrashing could only spin you deeper under. The buzz of pain through all the nerves he had was too relentless to do anything but surrender and blindly hope Clark exhausted himself before he dealt the final blow. Besides, wasn’t this almost what he was wishing for before Clark blew in like a hurricane? He almost laughed at the concept. Clark, unknowingly fulfilling every hideous need for punishment and violence he’d been harbouring since the day at the top of the LuthorCorp skyscraper. Some tension melted out of his muscles, then. He would rather take whatever agony Clark wants to give him than think about what he’d done for a moment longer.

No, the strange thing was that Clark’s blows were growing lighter. Not at all at once, but undeniably. They didn’t rattle him to his core. They were assuming an almost dreamy, faux quality, like a road Lex had walked down many times before, with other partners.

Surely not. Clark might have grown up a little since Smallville, but Lex was absolutely positive he didn’t know anything about BDSM. It was probably a measure of the concussion that must be brewing in his head from every earlier punch and fall.

“I’m going to kill you for how wrong it is,” Clark said, fisting his hands in Lex’s button-up. He fell into a lunge so that his leg propped them both up where it ground heavily into Lex’s side.

“What?” Lex asked dumbly.

“That this is our first kiss.”

Lex didn’t have time to formulate a single thought before Clark’s mouth was on him, open and uncompromising and wet. He moaned fervently. Clark’s tongue slid between his lips, plundering his mouth like he’d been aching to do it for years.

Maybe he had, Lex thought. It had the shrill, ceaseless ring of certainty. Oh, God.

Clark’s fingers pressed into his shoulders and chest hard, squeezing him. For a moment, Lex was terrified that Clark might crush the life out of him without even meaning to. And then this would all be over far too quickly.

Clark hummed into his mouth before remembering himself and biting down on Lex’s bottom lip. Lex gasped, the sudden hot well of pain sending a zing straight to his cock.

This was not the way he thought he’d go out.

Clark yanked and ripped his shirt open. The buttons scattered across the floor to lonesome corners of the room.

Clark’s jaw dropped open at the sight of the recent scars on his chest. The symbols Edward Teague had left him with. He traced them, torturously slow, and when Lex whined and shifted he dug his nails in, leaving perfect crescent moon shapes in the already disfigured flesh.

“Clark?” Lex asked. Knew he was risking his life to ask. “How long?”

Clark’s eyes beat back up to his. His expression soured. “You don’t get to ask questions,” he said simply, before pressing Lex back so he was held up on his palms, forearms straining. He dropped down on Lex, slotting one leg between his, to cup his bare skull in his hands and crush him in another kiss.

“Mm,” Lex breathed out. He wasn’t going to fight this. He had no fucking desire to. The world was ending, everything was lost. He’d let himself have whatever demons Clark was willing to unleash on him for the night. “Tell me, Clark. Tell me what you want. Tell me how to be good for you.”

Old words made new, new in the presence of Clark.

Clark’s hands skipped down and his nails tore at the sensitive flesh between Lex’s hip bones and his flat stomach.

“You don’t know how to be good,” Clark growled. “That’s what got us here, Lex.”

But he was leaving a string of simmering kisses along the juncture between Lex’s shoulder and neck.

Lex wasn’t sure how long he’d been hard. Whether he had been since Clark hurled him on the floor, since the first slap, or since he’d asked Clark what he wanted and watched the sweet mask of a predator scenting its prey slip over his old friend’s face.

“You don’t fucking talk at all. Got it?”

Lex nodded, catching his breath before it could betray him in the form of an ‘alright’ or, worse still, a ‘yes sir.’

He considered not talking more of a reprieve than anything else. Even if it came hot on the heels of ‘You don’t know how to be good,’ which felt like Clark had already stabbed him and he was just bleeding out with each new movement.

Lex’s traitorous eyes just flickered down to where Clark’s t-shirt rode up around his waist. Skin. God, how he’d longed to see Clark’s bare skin.

“Undress me,” Clark said, a little smugly.

Lex bent to his task immediately. Every inch of skin revealed was a spell, binding him deeper and deeper to whatever Clark’s twisted sense of pleasure dictated. His mouth hung open when he finished. Clark was beautiful. Strong and broad, miles of gold flushed pink like a sunset. His hard, red cock stood to attention.

Lex half expected Clark to push him down and make him suck it. Would’ve welcomed that, too. Instead, Clark kicked his clothes in a pile behind Lex and pulled him down until he sat on them. Lex kicked off his shoes and socks. He could see where this was going. Then Clark ripped off his slacks, his leather belt snapping in two, so that he was completely naked.

Clark ran a thumb over the belt before setting it down at his side. He ran his hands over Lex’s chest and abdomen, conjuring up shivers in their wake, before nipping at his belly, his thighs. Lex thought he might be dreaming when Clark licked him good and wet and engulfed him in his mouth with no hesitation.

He couldn’t help it: his hips jolted forwards, begging to take more of that sweet heat around him. Clark withdrew abruptly, the cold air worrying his slick flesh. Clark slapped his hip once, leaving a harsh sting behind where he touched Lex.

Lex’s cock jerked, and he writhed under Clark.

Clark smiled up at him like a shark.

They played that game for a while, Clark sucking Lex, sometimes letting his teeth skate along his sensitive cock, smacking his sides sharply when he did anything Clark didn’t like. Lex could feel the redhot throb and ache that was gingerly creeping over the places Clark had hit him. He’d forgotten it but it was like a drug.

Clark curled his palm around Lex’s balls and squeezed them, hard enough to send spikes of hurt through his very center, while he laved his tongue relentlessly over just the head of Lex’s dick.

Lex cried out.

Clark stopped.

He would’ve come, then. He felt the start of it sneaking up, knew it would’ve been the kind that wracks your body so savagely that it leaves you confused and abused by even the very pleasure.

They weren’t his favourite kind of orgasms, but his cock screamed at the denial.

Clark sat, legs splayed long, heels braced against the floor. “Here,” he beckoned.

Lex stumbled to him, and Clark guided him so they were tangled together, Lex’s head on his shoulder, his erection pressed into Clark’s lap.

Clark’s hand reigned down abruptly on the swell of his ass. The metal of Clark’s bracelet caught at his skin, making it twinge.

Lex let out a desperate moan, a protest he didn't mean. Everything had narrowed down to the feel of Clark’s hand, big and strong, the beat of Clark’s heart, perversely rapid. He would do anything Clark said now, and he could cry with the relief.

“Go on, Lex. You want it so bad? Take it.”

Absently, Lex realized he’d been rutting over whatever of Clark’s flesh he could get to at the awkward angle.

“I’m not going to stop,” Clark whispered. “I’m not going to stop because I don’t want to. This is what you do to me, Lex.”

Maybe he didn’t meant it as praise, but as condemnation. Lex didn’t care, would’ve taken either as praise, and he groaned, hips kicking into action.

Clark lifted one leg slightly.

“That’s it, fuck my thighs Lex. Do it.”

Lex was, he was pressing himself between Clark’s legs, fucking up into the tight hold of his muscles and soft skin. Like tree trunks, he thought dizzily. Whirls of dark hair that get him dangerously close to busting all over them. The only real shame was that there’s no way to make this rough, no way to make it hurt.

Clark was taking care of that, though. He was now grabbing Lex’s cheeks between his fingers, massaging in rough circles, letting him feel every ounce of what he’d done to him.

“On the ground,” Clark said in that dangerous, black velvet voice. When Lex followed the order, leaned onto his elbows, Clark insinuated himself behind him and pulled Lex’s hips up.

Yes. He could’ve guessed. He screwed his eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable.

But he heard Clark spit, and it wasn’t Clark’s cock that breaches him, it was his fingers. Two of them, and none too gentle, but it was more than he expected. His hole burned as Clark scissored them open and closed, and his eyes started to water faintly.

“You’ve been so good about not talking,” Clark commented quietly as he shoved a third finger in, making Lex tremble like a leaf.

“Should’ve always been this easy,” Clark added darkly. “You should’ve let me tell you what to do all the way back then. Then we wouldn’t be here now. We wouldn’t be here, you get it?”

He jabbed deeper into Lex, pressing into his prostate.

“Fuck, Clark,” Lex bursted out.

Clark tssked, and reached for something out of view.

The belt lashed down on Lex’s back next, and Lex’s spine went utterly straight as the shock lanced through him.

Clark did it again. And a third time, until Lex thought his teeth might crack from clenching them together, and that he might come untouched.

“Here, I’ll help you.”

That was all the warning he got before Clark was pressing the belt between his lips, gagging him. He let out a low muffled moan into the leather.

“I should’ve been inside you a thousand ways, Lex. None of them like this. But this is all we have left, of me, of you, of us.”

Clark circled his fingers around Lex’s rim from the inside, stretching him even further before pulling out entirely.

“Spit,” he instructed.

Lex spat, watching it glisten in the firelight in Clark’s hand before Clark goes to slick himself up. Holy fuck, Clark Kent’s cock. Imminently going to be inside him.

“You drove us here, Lex,” Clark groaned, whether at the unfairness of the situation, or at the feel of his hand, Lex wasn’t sure.

“I hate you,” is what he said when he pushed in for the first time.

Lex was grateful for the belt now, as he bit down into it helplessly.

Clark’s dick, thick and long, was buried in him, rearranging his intestines, Clark’s hips meeting his sore cheeks. He could swear he felt the vein in it pulsing.

“I hate you,” Clark said again, like he didn’t hear him the first time.

Lex gulped. Everything was spinning out of control.

Those words were the real punishment, not any of the physical pain or injuries he might have sustained tonight. He took heart in the fact it sounded like they might be hurting Clark just as much.

Curiously, Clark started to kiss the back of his neck and up his scalp to that bony ridge at his occipital, flicking his tongue out in little kitten licks.

“Oh my god,” Clark stuttered. “You feel so…”

Lex closed his eyes, heart pounding. Tell me, tell me.

“So good, Lex, God.”

Clark mouthed down the knobs of his spine before pushing him flat against the floor, canting his hips at different angles until he finds Lex’s prostate again. Lex’s cock leaked copiously where it was pressed ruthlessly into the floor. He could feel the wet patch growing under him, the slick spreading embarrassingly with each thrust.

“Never could’ve imagined,” Clark reaffirmed. He was fucking Lex roughly now, clinging to him too tightly. The burn had started to fade into a liquid warmth, spreading inwards everywhere Clark touched him.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Clark said, biting down on his shoulder, running his teeth all over him.

Clark dragged him up onto his knees, then, never sliding out of him. The change in angle let him in deeper, but it sent them closer to the fire. Lex whimpered, tried to get the belt out of his mouth, complaints dissolving into meaningless syllables against the restraint.

“Too hot to handle?” Clark crooned in his ear.

Lex went slack. Clark knew exactly what was bothering him, and he was going to keep him there.

He could only surrender to the heat on his skin from the crackling flames as it built and built, as it started to scald his nipples and all his other weak spots.

Clark offered him some remission when he wrapped his hand around Lex’s member, shielding him from the worst of it. Lex gasped, saliva dribbling down his chin.

Clark yanked the belt out of his mouth and tossed it aside.

“Alright,” he muttered. “No words. Only my name.”

Lex made some attempt at a nod, having sunk entirely into the feel of Clark stripping his cock and splitting him open, filling him. Twin anchors that would finally drag him down to the death that should have claimed him that day at the bridge. A brief, ecstatic burst of something like joy tore through him, rebellious to the last.

“Good boy,” Clark panted harshly in his ear, and Lex was gone, trembling and moaning, only Clark’s arm flung around his chest stopping him from tumbling into the fire. He looked down to see his come spread over Clark’s hand in the orange light, and closed his eyes before shuddering apart a few more times.

“Clark. Clark,” he heard himself saying.

Clark steered his limp body back into the pile of clothes. This time he did pull out, before pushing back in facing Lex, pinning him down in something deliciously similar to missionary.

“I hate you.”

The words echoed dully on Lex’s ears. He might be deaf and dumb for all he could bring himself to care now.

A spark of curiosity spread across Clark’s beautiful face as he closed his fingers around Lex’s throat again. Lex acquiesced so easily, melting into it. Clark’s breath caught, his teeth digging into his lip.

Clark’s thrusts became frantic, his whole body humping into Lex’s with the unruly chaos of desire.

Lex breathed his name out occasionally, revelling in the only sound he was allowed to breathe aloud.

Clark kept talking, kept up mumbled I Hate You’s in between gloriously filthy French kisses. They words getting softer, kept feeling like they were code for something else, some final secret Lex hadn’t yet cracked. But the last one, gritted out in one long rush, before he stopped talking at all, was, “I hate you for making me hate you.”

Then he keened, grabbed at Lex and snapped his hips into him hard. He released sheathed deep inside of him, hot spurts falling one after the other, the sounds from his lips devolving into hard sighs.

Lex wrapped his arms around Clark after, sinking into the clothes that smelled like both of them. He didn’t know if he was allowed to, but he did it anyway. Clark’s full weight came down on him gradually as he relaxed.

Even if he does kill me, at least I finally had this.

After an eternity, Clark pulled back and peered deeply into Lex’s eyes.

“So?” Lex asked, all faux bravado.

Clark stroked a hand down the side of his face.

“Going to take care of me?” Oh fuck, and there was the incriminating quaver in his voice.

Clark withdrew his softening cock from Lex. He stood, staring down at Lex, naked and debauched and probably bruised and broken, too.

“I told you. I’m going to do whatever the hell I want to.”

Clark’s hands tightened into fists, and a lump rose in Lex’s throat. Here it came, after all.

“There’s been a gun on the mantlepiece since you came in, you know. My little ode to Chekov.”

Clark shook his head tightly. “Go to bed, Lex.”

This was a dream. It was the only explanation, no matter how every sense he had were babbling to Lex to let him know that he’d been beaten and fucked within an inch of his life. God, how he wanted Clark to pick him up in his arms and soothe him properly, put him to bed himself if he wanted it so damn much. Anything.

Luthor appetites really were voracious. He’d gotten away with his life, and still, he hungered for more impossible things.

Clark just walked out. Completely bare, like a statue of an angel. Even his feet. How would he get home like that? It was bitterly cold outside, threatening snow.

Naked apart from the bracelet on his wrist. Lex stared at the red glint as it blinked out into nothingness in the hallway. He didn’t know exactly what it meant, he just knew it meant he was utterly screwed.

Chapter Text

CLARK

The next morning arrived with all the grace of a bucket of ice water being dumped over Clark’s head. There was a spell of about three seconds where he wondered why he was naked, and then he remembered everything.

Oh god, did he remember everything.

Shooting to his feet, he scrabbled for his clothes, for anything to occupy his hands. He swept his hair back out from his forehead frantically.

Not only had he failed to kill Lex…

He’d. He’d.

He’d beaten him within an inch of his life and…and forced himself on him.

Raped him?

Small fragments called it into question. ‘You said there were things you wanted. Don’t you want them now?’ and ‘Tell me how to be good for you.’ And Lex’s helpless little thrusts between his thighs –

– No. No, no, no. He’d told Lex he was going to kill him. Lex couldn’t have thought he had a choice, he was just trying to stay alive. God, he could still hear himself saying it. ‘I’m not going to stop because I don’t want to.’

Blaming Lex for it. Telling him he hated him the whole time he screwed him.

Clark sped to the bathroom and heaved dry over the sink.

He’d gone in there to play hero, or grim reaper if it came to that. Instead the red kryptonite had shown him what he really was: all the filth that lay at the bottom of him.

He’d wanted to hurt Lex, so, so badly.

He’d liked hurting Lex even more.

Swallowing nervously, Clark felt himself getting treacherously hard at the memories that were pouring across his mind’s eye like a flood of fire.

He let out a laugh that didn’t sound like him, even to his ringing ears. This was Lex they were talking about. Lex who he’d once loved at least as much as he was bitterly disappointed by him in recent memory. An old friend, as much as he was an enemy, a force to behold. Lex, who he’d once saved. Just to play with him like some sort of twisted sex slave years down the line.

Lex was right. He really was a monster. If he was capable of doing something like that to someone he'd cared about, maybe the world really did need saving from him.

                                                                                                            *

Chloe was gone too. Clark had wanted to wail in the walls of the Smallville hospital when he saw her. Lana, Lex, any sense of self he had that he trusted, and now Chloe.

Clark shoved Brainiac back, pinning him to the metal wall of generators.

“The only way to save them would be to kill me now in cold blood. Which goes against everything you stand for. You could never deliberately take another man’s life.”

Brainiac paused, licking his upper lip.

“Although you could drive one very close to the brink of wishing you had, it appears.” He gave a quiet, glib laugh. “You left him in quite the sorry state, boy. But don’t worry. He’s well enough to take care of you. You didn’t leave him many reasons to hold back.”

Clark knew every emotion he had was showing on his face, but he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t make himself blank. Everything was ruined anyway.

“You’re not a man,” he said. “You’re a machine.”

Clark ripped two thick electrical cables from the metal box next to him. The flow of current started to spark out, white-hot.

“You can kill me, Kal-El. But your end is near. There is nothing you can do to stop it.” Brainiac wheezed for breath, but his voice came through in a thick, mocking current of syrup. “And you know what’s funny, last son of Krypton? It’ll mean nothing. You and your…brother-lover are just the latest incarnation of a phantasmagoria that’s been running since time immemorial. Good and evil? Please. It won’t mean a damn in the end, but oh, how I hope you go out bloody.” He grinned defiantly up at Clark, the low blue light gleaming off of his teeth.

“You’ll never hurt anyone else ever again.” Clark plunged the steel cables against his chest. As the voltage arced into Brainiac and blew the thinly veiled mechanical illusion of life out of his frame, leaving Clark alone in the dark of asphalt, he felt more like he had been talking to himself.

                                                                                                            *

Lex padded through the light dusting of snow on the floor of the fortress. Clark could hear his hesitant, halting footsteps before he heard his heart offering up its steady, intoxicated thump of fascination and fear.

“It really is you,” Lex said when his eyes fixed on Clark.

Had that been in question? Even though for some unidentifiable reason, he hadn’t gone truly off leash on the Red K by using the full extent of his strength, Clark assumed it had been a given when he’d snapped his belt in two.

“Lex, Lex I’m so sorry.” Clark’s voice came out low and rough.

Lex half laughed. “For which bit, Clark?”

Lex looked bad. A large black circle marred his right eye, and he moved stiffly. Walked with a limp. Clark’s head was spinning.

“I know I have no right to ask you not to do this. I know there’s no way you’ll listen to me. I know I…I hurt you, Lex.” How woefully inadequate the words sound even as they tumble from his lips to land with the other snowflakes at their feet.

“What, in general?” Lex raised a single eyebrow.

Clark turned his face to the ceiling, every breath drawing a deeper sense of panic into his lungs. “Last night,” he said brokenly.

Lex laughed, a full, raucous thing. “You think I want to talk about last night?”

Last night was all Clark could think of. It was a horrible tsunami welling up around his eyes, his ears, threatening to pound everything he thought he knew into flotsam and jetsam.

“You’re the traveller, Clark.” Lex hissed.

“I know there’s no excuse, I know I can never make it up to you –”

“If you feel so fucking bad about it, I’d like to cash in that I-O-U for a moratorium on the topic. If I’ve earned anything from you all these years,” Lex said icily.

Clark closed his mouth helplessly and nodded once.

“You’ve lived among us as a mild-mannered farm boy. But secretly, you’re a strange visitor from another planet plotting our demise.”

“No – that’s not what I’m doing at all,” Clark protested.

“It’s a brilliant disguise, Clark. You don’t even need a mask.”

A long time ago, they stood in the Kent family kitchen, Lex promising him he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. Clark answering that he knew: or else he would’ve worn a mask. The memory rattled around in his chest like a trapped bird, leaving long scars with its claws in an endeavour to escape.

How could he tell Lex he wasn’t what he thought? How could he tell him he wasn’t a monster in disguise as a hero?

“I never meant to hurt you.” Lie, lie, lie.

Even in his anger, Lex looked lost. “You didn’t trust me. With everything you had, with everything you could do, did you ever think about what we could’ve accomplished together? I could’ve helped you become a hero. I would’ve protected you. You had to know that.”

Clark shook his head. “You were a risk I couldn’t take.” Then, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“It does.” Lex’s gloved hand shook from how hard he was clutching at the purple orb in his palm. “If you wanted me so bad, why’d you wait so long? Why’d you wait to do it like this? Or was it all just some obscure power trip, in the end?”

Clark gaped. Not sure if he was allowed to respond, having vowed no to speak about it. “I –”

“You don’t even know, do you. God, naïve and bumbling to the very end, with enough strength to rip apart the hearts and lives of everyone you touch.”

With enough strength to rip apart his heart, Lex meant. He’d betrayed him, more stunningly than either of them could ever have anticipated.

“Lex, please, clear your head. This is about more than just us.”

“Right now, I’m doing this for the world. I have to protect the human race from you.”

“It’s my life,” Clark pleaded.

“It’s my birthright! After all my sacrifices, after all the pain, I finally understand. I was being prepared for a much greater destiny. Everything led me to this moment. Even you.” Lex’s lip curled. “It doesn’t matter what might or might not be between us. You’re a risk I can’t take. Not with everything you can do.”

“Is this really what you want?” He should be using everything he has to stop Lex. But that’s all he said.

Everything in him that would’ve screamed for a fight is subdued, lashed firmly back in its box because the last time he’d let his instincts lead, he’d mistreated Lex in ways nothing could ever let him forget.

Lex’s eyes glittered. He didn’t answer the question. “Who am I to turn my back on my fellow man? Especially after you turned your back on me.”

Clark winced, lips screwed together. Say something, say anything. Say you regret not telling him. It was the truth, after all. But he couldn’t make himself speak.

“I’m sorry, Clark. But you are the Traveller. You hold the future of the entire planet in your hands. I’m here to take it back.”

“Lex.”

“You’ll never be a threat to anyone ever again. Kal-El.”

“Lex, don’t!” Clark cried out, but the plea fell on deaf ears. Which could only be karma, really.

Lex placed the orb onto one of the crystalline points, and light radiated out from it. Clark collapsed. A strange feeling was flowing through him, making his head and limbs grow immensely heavy.

As icicles started to fall from the ceiling and the ground began to rumble, Lex swept over to him in his long black coat and folded him in his arms.

“I love you, Clark. But it has to end this way. I’m sorry.” The softness in Lex’s voice was as close to the Lex he remembered as he’d gotten in years.

“Don’t do this,” Clark said, his tongue lolling loose in its socket. It was as if innumerable pairs of invisible hands held him in place. The world was crashing in on them. Lex, soft, human, would get hit first. “Let me save you.”

Lex’s eyes widened for a millisecond.

“For old times’ sake,” Clark tried.

“No,” Lex insisted.

But the invisible hands had all let go, and Clark rolled him onto his back, sheltering Lex from the fallout with his body.

                                                                                                            *

Clark set Lex down on a black velvet armchair in a small study in the mansion. Lex had refused to go to any of the usual rooms with a single wave of his hand from where Clark had him clasped and carried in his arms.

Clark swallowed. “Lex, I think you’re in shock.”

Lex’s eyes were fixed on some far corner of the room, and his lips trembled where they parted to draw in shallow breaths.

After a moment, it seemed like his words had filtered through into Lex’s consciousness. “What the hell do you care?”

Like Clark hadn’t just begged him to let him save him.

But considering recent events, Lex could be forgiven for thinking Clark didn’t give a damn about him. You didn’t do things like that to someone you cared about. Or at least, you were never supposed to.

“Lex –”

“No. No.” Lex leaned back, crossing his legs with his hands pressed between his thighs. “You’re going to tell me everything.”

“What?”

A spike of fury went through Lex’s face. “Tell me everything. Where you came from. What you are. What you can do. Every time you lied to me, and why. The truth. The whole truth. And - you know the drill.”

Clark wanted to ask him to wait, to make him drink a glass of water first. To apologize again. But a tingling force crept up the back of his neck and pried his jaw open, and he found himself obeying Lex’s command instead.

It all spilled out of him. Every detail, from that day Lex hit him with the Porsche. Every revelation, every new ability, the agony of youth and time. Dr. Swan, Veritas, Kara, Jor-El. And yes, every lie. The fear around Lex that nestled in the pit of his stomach early on and grew, and grew with every new wrongdoing, every meteor rock stockpile, every time he couldn’t turn away from investigating the truth. How careful his parents had been, how everyone he had told had been hurt by it, how it had killed Lana once. How he eventually pushed it all away, after 33.1, when he knew that was what Lex wanted to do to him, to lay him out on a lab table and figure out how best to use his parts.

“And now you have what you always wanted. And I’m so worried I could throw up and please, Lex. Please don’t use me to hurt anyone. Please, I swear I’ll –”

“Shut up,” Lex said.

The words died in his throat.

Lex had listened to the whole gory tale in silence, still apart from a ticking in the muscle of his jaw.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“No,” Clark admitted. He started telling him about the meteor rocks. He couldn’t stop, not until the whole truth had burned their way out on his tongue and left him a purified offering in its wake. How green could kill him, how red…red removed his inhibitions.

“I thought if I put it on I’d incapacitate you, to stop you so that you couldn’t control me. I couldn’t make myself kill you without it, I never could. I never thought…I want to tell you I never wanted to hurt you like that, but obviously I…Lex, I had no idea what I’d do, I swear, you have to believe me,” he moaned.

Lex held up his hand, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Enough.”

Clark waited. When had he sank down to his knees?

“Lex?” he asked quietly after a long moment had passed.

Lex brushed his hand over his face. “It’s been a long night, Clark. This is a lot to take in all at once.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Clark asked helplessly.

Lex closed his eyes, looking painfully young and old beyond his years all at once. “I’m not going to use you to hurt people, Clark. I was trying to save everyone, if you recall.”

“Two days ago I would’ve told you the world didn’t need any protecting from me. I’ve always thought I was doing good. But I guess I was wrong.” Clark ran his thumbnail under his other nails, wondering if any stray flecks of Lex’s blood might remain there.

Lex stood up in a rush, fidgeting anxiously. “You may as well stop apologizing for last night.”

“I raped you,” Clark bit out. “How can I stop apologizing for that?!”

Lex’s whole face crashed in on itself then opened up wide. He stared at Clark for a moment. “Clark…” he whispered. “You…you didn’t.”

Clark winced. “I forced you. I hurt you. I coerced –”

“You did not rape me,” Lex declared, forceful and loud, like a sudden peal of thunder.

Clark frowned at him. “I don’t know how you can be sure,” he said in a small voice. “When we…when I…”

Lex sighed and reached down to draw Clark up to his feet. “I am sure. The how of it is immaterial. Think I can I order you to believe me?”

Clark swallowed, Lex’s calm tone settling something in his gut that he never thought would be settled again.

“It was still wrong. I was wrong. It was a, a bad thing. I was.” Bad, he doesn’t say.

If Jonathan Kent was alive to see what he’d done: well, he’d been none too fond of Lex, but he knew right from wrong. Knew that there were some things no one deserved to have done to them. Some things that only someone extremely depraved would want to do, would think of even in the darkest parts of themselves.

“Christ, Clark. I can’t do this right now.”

Clark nodded, the guilt suffusing every inch of his bones. Not only was everything wrecked between he and Lex, Lex knew everything now. He had complete control of him. Clark had lost the battle and the war.

“Go to bed,” Lex said.

He felt his feet moving, following Lex down the shadowy hallway.

“Take the guest room farthest from mine,” Lex instructed, pointing at the door.

Clark looked at it but didn’t enter. The strange force was at his back now, compelling him to follow Lex instead, to close his bedroom door behind him.

Lex turned and looked at him with wide eyes. “What are you doing?”

His voice trembled, but it didn’t sound exactly like fear.

Clark felt himself take three steps forward and smooth his hand over Lex’s pectoral muscle through his shirt. “Shh,” he said, the words pulling out of him like something he’d swallowed and couldn’t help but cough it back up again.

Lex shook his head, some calculation running frantically in his deep grey eyes and coming up with the wrong answer, over and over again. “What are you doing?”

Clark drew Lex to him, ensconcing him in his arms and resting their foreheads together. “Shh,” he repeated. “I’m giving you what you need.”

“It can’t work like this,” Lex muttered. “It can’t be.”

Lex’s body felt so perfect against him. How he wished they could pretend this was some universe were they never started to hate one another, where Clark hadn’t just surrendered the fate of the universe, where they were just slow dancing in the living room. In their living room.

As if a ghostly hand fit over his and pushed it, he cupped Lex’s jaw and tilted it up. Soft, but in a way that that brooked no dissent. He kissed him, and if it weren’t for the panic kicking up a storm in his chest, it would’ve felt like fireworks. Lex’s mouth opened for him, and he made a kittenlike little sound that Clark swallowed. Before he knew what was happening, he’d pushed Lex back onto the four-poster bed, had him caged in under his body.

“Do you know how badly I’ve needed to get back inside you since that night?” The question had a stony ring to it that confused Clark even more than the fact he could swear he hadn’t chosen to say it all.

When he broke away to skim his palm up Lex’s stomach, Lex said desperately, “Wait.”

The word had a weight to it than none of the others had. Clark froze.

“N-no,” Lex stuttered. “Not like this. Jesus Christ, get away from me.”

When Clark didn’t move at first, he cried again, “Get off!”

That one had him practically throwing himself away from Lex, retreating faster than the human eye could see until his back was pressed flat against the wall. The joists shook from the impact.

“Lex, Lex I didn’t…” Clark didn’t know what to say. Lex had just told him he didn’t rape him, so what, he decided to try try try again until he succeeded?

Lex blinked at him rapidly, as if to clear tears. “I know you didn’t.” His mouth a thin, white line, he said, “Now go to bed, Clark.”

This time, the words made him move. He shuffled into the far bedroom like the dead, falling into bed and staring up at the ceiling with the sheets tangled around him.

Oh God. Clark couldn’t breathe. He’d kissed him when he told him not to, had been leading up to doing a lot more. Lex had told him no. Lex had looked like he was almost going to cry.

There weren’t meant to be any cracks in the control that Jor-El’s device gave Lex over Clark. But clearly, there were. Or why would he only have obeyed some of Lex’s orders? With a small, wounded noise that no one heard, he curled up in the foetal position.

Whatever the weak link in the chain was, that was letting Clark try to fulfil his most twisted desires with Lex yet again even with no red meteor rocks in sight, he had to find a way to exploit it. So that he could get free. And fix what he could, even though most of it could never be repaired. He shuddered and closed his eyes, a lone tear slipping through before he did.

*

Lex was gone in the morning. The room was empty. His things had been packed in a hurry, leaving a trail of undesired items in their wake. His driver was gone, and so was one of his less flashier models of sports car.

Clark spun around, as if this new sweep of the kitchen might reveal Lex hiding in a cabinet somewhere.

Even extending his hearing out as far as it could go, he couldn’t hear a trace of Lex. He had to be somewhere out beyond the county line.

Clark couldn’t face the dizzy emptiness that careened through him. He wanted to drop to his knees and scream. Lex was running away from him, because he was scared, and he was right to be. Clark couldn’t believe that after everything, he’d had the nerve to come onto Lex again. He was a fucking freak, that’s what he was.

He couldn’t stand being with his own thoughts for a moment longer, so he perched on a high wooden stool and picked up the landline to call Chloe.

“Clark! I’ve been so worried! What happened?”

Clark cleared his throat. “He won, Chloe.”

“What? No. You don’t mean that, Clark. I thought you were going to take care of him! Oh, Clark.” Her tone came out tinnier and tinnier through the speaker as her distress escalated.

“Oh, I took care of him alright.” Clark gave a dark scoff.

“Okay, okay. We can…there has to be some angle we can work. Wait, is this a trap? Why is he letting you call me? Clark?”

“He’s not here.”

“O-okay?”

“He knows everything.”

“Oh God.” She sounded so scared.

Clark tried to marshal some memories of he and Lex’s conversation from the previous night, from before the bedroom. “It’s…it’s maybe not as bad as it could be, Chloe. After I told him everything, he mostly seemed tired. He really thinks he was trying to save people. Maybe he won’t…you know.”

“Use you as a weapon of mass destruction?! Yeah, right. No, Clark, we have to get you out from under his thumb. You know that with Lex, the other shoe always drops sooner or later.” He was now on the receiving end of kind, stern Chloe, not freaked, discombobulated Chloe.

“Except what if I’m the other shoe?”

“Come again?”

“Chloe – Chloe when I put on that bracelet. I didn’t go for the kill. I…” The acid wash of anxiety eating through his chest might kill him. What he’d done was unforgivable. Once she knew, his last friend he’d known since childhood would be gone. “I beat him up. And then I slept with him.”

“Oh, my god,” Chloe said, stunned.

“I think I made him, Chloe. He said I didn’t, but there’s no way that what I did was…okay. I had no idea I could ever…and there have been things after that, and I. Maybe he’s right to want me chained to the mast, you know?”

“God, Clark!” He can hear her cogs whirring through the line. “Okay, calm down. He said you didn’t force him?”

“He said he was sure I didn’t rape him.” Clark echoed sullenly.

She sucked in a breath when he used the actual word. “And you’re saying this is the first time you guys have slept together? Or not?”

Clark choked on his own spit. “Huh?!”

“Please, you guys were mooning over each other in high school. For a minute I was relieved since I thought you were gay and how could I compete with a billionaire with the right junk if so, but, well, not to make this all about me.”

“You thought I was gay,” Clark said, trying it on for size. “Lex was mooning over me?”

“You’re not telling me you didn’t know. He was so obvious about it, Clark.”

“That’s great. That’s great, I violated not just my one time best friend, but a guy who’s had a crush on me for half a decade. Yeah. Perfect.”

“Look, I don’t know what happened, alright? I’m sure if you were on red kryptonite, it was…nasty. But if Lex said it wasn’t something he didn’t want, shouldn’t you listen? Doesn’t the final say kind of rest with him?”

“He’s gone,” Clark said numbly. “He left.”

“He made you tell him everything and then left? Holy moly, he’s probably cooking up the biggest batch of kryptonite stew for you we’ve ever seen. I have to get over there now.”

“He doesn’t need to now he can control me. And I think he left because…well, I kissed him. Last night. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t even thinking about it. But I did it anyway. And I said…things to him, and I don’t know why, and I think I must belong in the basement level of Belle Reeve or something…”

“Slow down! You kissed him?”

“He told me to go to bed but I followed him into his room instead.” Now he’d started spilling his shameful secrets, he couldn’t stop. She had to know everything, or if she forgave him, it wouldn’t mean anything.

“And you didn’t mean to but you kissed him,” Chloe mused. “Maybe you’re just mixed up about everything between you two?” She offered in a tiny voice, like she knew the idea had no legs.

“No, God, Chloe, it was more like a compulsion or something.” Compulsion. The word rolled nastily around his head. Clark Kent, Grade 8 Predator and Pervert. Can I interest you in Metropolis’ newest superhero? We call him The Lecher, keep your sons away.

“A compulsion,” Chloe repeated breathily. “Clark, tell me again how the control thing works. It’s a psychic link, right?”

“No,” Clark frowned. “It’s verbal. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes he’ll say something and it’s like I have to obey, and sometimes nothing happens. I guess when he’s really fired up, then it seems to always work. There must be some kind of flaw in it – I figure that’s how we get me out.” He was tired even at the mention of getting his free will returned to him.

Chloe sounded strangled. “Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll dig into the chink in the armour theory. But everything I’ve uncovered about the artefact in the past twenty-four hours points to it possessing some kind of mind-melding capabilities.”

“You’re saying it’s not about what he’s saying, but about what he’s thinking.”

“Right. What if he only means what he says some of the time?”

The world might as well be rearranging itself around him as they speak. “You’re saying I kissed him not because it was what I wanted, but because it was what he wanted.”

It sounded too good to be true, that was what it sounded like.

“Clark, if I’m right, that makes him even more dangerous. A Lex who’s controlling you based on his conscious commands is bad enough, but a Lex who has you completely at the whims of his unconscious mind? We don’t even know how bad that could get.”

She was right, he guessed. If he hadn’t always trusted Lex’s innate self more than the layers of artifice he concocted around it and the chess games he took up playing with everyone’s lives.

“If you’re right, I’m only the worst person ever once, and not twice,” Clark breathed out.

He was thinking about the fall of the fortress, the strange feeling of all those hands pinning him, how Lex had said no to being saved but how they’d lifted so he’d been able to move. He was thinking about the same feeling being present when Lex had ordered him to tell the truth, and about how it hadn’t been there when Lex told him to take the room furthest from his. About Lex’s strange choice of words when he’d embraced him: ‘It can’t work like this. It can’t be.’ The things he’d said, things that were true but that he never intended to say aloud, that were dragged up from some unutterable depths inside him, and the strange, swift feel of his tongue like it was being hurried along a preslicked path to speed them into the atmosphere.  

Lex might have wanted it. Might have wanted the tender kiss, wanted himself pinned down to the bed. Wanted to hear Clark’s revelations of longing to slip into his body again.

And that meant…did that mean?

“You weren’t yourself on the Red K. That’s my fault, Clark. I gave it to you. I should never have put you in that position.”

“I was myself,” he said, low and pained. “I hurt him, Chloe. During. Like those…late night channels with the leather and the hot wax, but worse.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.” Chloe sounded like she was deciding whether this was a hill she was going to die on. “I’m sure it would hardly be Lex Luthor’s first foray into BDSM. Although it sounds like it didn't exactly live up to the safe, sane, and consensual motto. But we really, really have more important things to worry about right now, like, y’know, the fate of the world?”

“I think working out if I did one of the most heinous things imaginable to someone is pretty important, Chloe. You should probably want to know if I’m the kind of hero you want to save before you commit to the jail-break, don’t you think?”

“Then I guess you’d better find him and talk to him,” she snapped. “I’ll be working on how to pull your bacon out of the fire, in the meantime.”

“Chloe?”

“Yes,” she answered, irritated but still there, patient despite herself.

“Do you hate me?”

He’d meant to varnish the sentiment some other way, so it didn’t come out as pathetic and needy. He hadn’t had time to: he’d needed to know too badly.

“No, Clark. Okay, so you’re more man than angel. It happens.”

But she did sound a little regretful. This was probably how he’d sounded trying to reassure Lana that he still felt the same way about her, now that he really saw her.

“And if Lex hated you for it, you’d probably be feeling his wrath by now.”

“Okay. Thanks, Chloe.”

“Bye.”

Clark did look for Lex. He looked all over the globe. He wandered through mountains in Japan, cities with the same clamour and smog no matter where you go, tropical Islands, the prairies that turn purple right before sunsets and storms, secret military bases. He didn't find him anywhere. No schemes of mass destruction appeared to be afoot, either.

Nineteen days later, Clark heard the steady pulse of Lex’s heart as he entered the LuthorCorp lobby and took the elevator up to the top floor.

Chapter Text

LEX

It took nearly two and a half weeks with a shaman in Tibet to learn to control his errant thoughts and scattergun impulses, but he did it. His mind had become bulletproof. Hours of gruelling meditations, a multiplicity of different techniques. Ensuring his will could retain its iron configuration through conditions of pain, heat, cold, arousal, shame, fear, anger, hunger, exhaustion, and happiness. (The latter one had been the most difficult to summon up.) Lex’s thoughts had always been active: he hadn’t known it was a capacity that could ever be truly fatigued. The end of the training day, which came only at midnight, left him feeling used up, with an aching strain between his temples that he never could’ve imagined before now.

His chosen mentor was only loosely a shaman, in truth. He’d been booted by his community and so far as Lex could tell, exiled by any fellow practitioners. That stood to reason, since he was the only person with dubious enough ethics to help clients like Lex Luthor. And to be imbued with the requisite discretion for such a task. But he knew what he was doing, and that was what counted.

Lex wasn’t going to hurt Clark in the particular way he knew he could. Sure, there were other considerations in play. Like, he did need to avoid setting off a superpowered alien like a rocket launcher at the slightest slip of annoyance or worse, to make manifest some inescapable desire for say, ultimate power with no regard for human life.

He shivered, thinking of the vision Cassandra had shown him once. God, but he was young then, younger than he could’ve known. Was this how it would come to pass? One man, just taking and taking, his own destiny clearly insufficient when he could bring Clark’s under his thumb as well? That sounded like how a lot of stories of world-rending destruction started, didn’t it.

It wasn’t even that he was afraid Clark would work it out, and that he would reveal his deepest, darkest desires through some singular mental slip.

No, the reason he had to be absolutely sure that the only commands Clark followed were the ones given consciously was to spare the boy. Lex laughed in the early dawn. Lex Luthor, what had become of him? The laugh bounced back to him off the walls of the limestone cavern his shaman friend apparently thought it was appropriate to house his guests in.

It didn’t matter. He was leaving today. First an ankle-breaking trek down the treacherous, rock-strewn slopes of the mountain, then a buggy ride descending through pine forests that were supposed to be impenetrable, and finally a car waiting to take him through the long open hills and plains to the air field.

He couldn’t even bring himself to yearn for the jet, for the numerous bottles of liquor and champagne he knew lay stashed away in the cupboards.

His mentor had warned him about that. He said this kind of discipline would make you crave some vices less, some not at all, and some more. Lex dreaded to think what the more side of the equation might be.

The abominable guilt that been burrowing stalwartly through the layers of his intestines ever since Clark told him the truth had been fuel for him when he was training. Now it sat and did nothing but ensure he felt every cinder of remorse. Maybe it would go away when he saw Clark’s face again, when he could reassure him that he wouldn’t force him to do anything awful.

Who was he kidding? The trust left between them made up barely enough spare change to cover a three-minute phone call.

Clark wasn’t exactly the impending threat to humanity he’d been promised. Lex grit his teeth. He’d been conned, and he’d taken the bait hook, line, and sinker. His agents had been out looking for Kara – or the thing wearing her face, at least, without any results. He could only pray she, or it, was dead or off-planet.

No, as each stunning revelation had sank in, the picture had grown clearer and clearer. Clark would never wilfully hurt humans. Had no plans of dominion of this delicate blue-and-green shell of a world. He had vulnerabilities that necessitated a contingency plan, like the red kryptonite, but that wasn’t the same thing. Clark was terrified that Lex would make him hurt people. Lex was the thing that in Clark’s mind, needed a contingency plan.

Well, he couldn’t say it wasn’t fair enough.

He’d sat there and watched the words twist themselves from Clark’s rosy lips, and he’d been acutely aware of what was happening. He was taking. Taking the truth by force. Taking a truth that had only not been his in the first place because he was the exact kind of person who would do something like this.

You never trusted me.

That had been his mantra for years, the gleaming amber shard stuck to the bottom of him that crystallized and preserved every reason he needed to antagonize Clark, the knife he twisted in his own insides to remind him of it when the going got rough.

He could see it now. Clark had been right not to trust him.

Well. Spilled milk and all that.

And yet, he’d trusted Lionel. Lex chewed the inside of his own cheek. Spilled milk, so far down the drain it was in the gutter. He’d try and pretend he could write it off.

The least he could do was prevent himself from unconsciously compelling the boy to try and screw him again. Jesus, what a sorry state of affairs.

Lex couldn’t even bring himself to be very mad about the sex. Or the fact that it would never happen again, because Clark seemed to be literally traumatized by what they’d done together. Clark thought he raped him. Lex’s guilt churned faster and stronger.

He could have done without the beating; his ribs were still healing. But he almost considered that…par for the course, between them now. He’d killed his father, Clark got to beat him up a little. Sure. Whatever. He wasn’t Catholic, but it was one instance of penance he could see eye to eye with.

He could really have done without the death threats and the balls-deep declarations of hatred. Those had…

Well. They’d hurt his feelings, is what they’d done.

But after Clark had calmed, after he’d decided to go after what he wanted? A shameful tingle crept back over him at the thought of it. At how rough and commanding Clark had been, at the feel of his cock and the pain he could tell he’d relished dishing out as much as Lex relished taking it. At the deep, sensual cadence of his voice when he’d told Lex how good he felt.

Fuck, no. Couldn’t get hard on the plane. Couldn’t get hard thinking about this.

The perverse truth of the matter was, Clark had kind of knocked Lex’s socks off. But that didn’t matter, because it was absolutely tearing him up inside, which made Lex feel all kinds of wrong for having enjoyed it. Clark had been raised up “right.” He’d never understand that something like this could be done in a respectful way, one that was mutually fulfilling for both parties and didn’t leave either of you emotionally wrecked. Even though he obviously had the inclination for it, buried somewhere under that gorgeous mountain of goody-two-shoes farmboy incarnate.

Lex had dropped hard, after Clark left. He’d lied upside down on his sofa and felt his eyes strain with the effort of summoning up tears. It took him two hours to call the doctor. He kept hoping Clark would come back. Kept wanting Clark to patch him up, ever so delicately, wind gauzy white bandages around his scrapes, and then maybe kiss him and curl around him and go to sleep. Maybe that could’ve chased away his dreams of his father’s head exploding as it hit the pavement.

Somehow, his reminders that he was lucky to be alive hadn’t chased away the dizzy hollowness clinging to every part of him, inside and out, that Clark had touched.

Clark wouldn’t understand that things weren’t black and white. That if they had a certain kind of relationship, he wouldn’t have even minded Clark not asking first, since in his infernal heart, he'd always been Clark’s. That they could’ve had their first kiss some other, sweeter, better way first, and they could’ve talked, and then Clark could’ve taken as much as he wanted. That if Clark had taken care of him after, none of all that helpless misery would’ve come to hang over him like stormclouds in his living room.

It was strange, how little shame Lex felt about expectations for aftercare from partners, considering how surely it would’ve been pegged as weakness in any other domain of his life. The typical rules of kink were so foreign, so completely different to the business room and almost polite, that it was one of the few times Lex let himself experience kindness without feeling like he’d tricked someone into it first.

“Wheels down in fifteen,” the pilot announced from the cockpit.

“Thanks, Jeremy,” he echoed absently.

For the first time in maybe a decade, Lex had almost no idea what to do next.

*

A knock came at his office door. No one other than his secretaries should have made it up to the top three levels of the building without an announcement from security, so he knew it was Clark.

“Come in?”

Clark walked in, already wearing his discomfort on his sleeve.

“Lex.”

“Clark.” Lex replied, considering him.

Clark cleared his throat. “Where did you go?”

“Away.” Lex tapped a stack of papers against the desk to line up the sheets in a straight line. “Business. A kind of training.”

“A CEO training?” Clark squinted.

“Not that kind of business. Did you need something?”

Clark frowned and ran his tongue over his lip. “Why’d you really go?” He asked in a small voice.

Ah. He was clearly still on the same train of thought as he had been last time they spoke. “It wasn’t because of anything you did, Clark.”

Clark hung his head. “I don’t know how I could even apologize for this one, anyway.”

Lex studied him. Clark wasn’t fully committed to the words. Some part of him was hanging back. That meant he suspected the truth, at least to some degree. Lex chose an unexpected tack: the truth.

“I don’t want you to apologize for it.”

Clark blinked, gazing right into Lex’s eyes for the first time since he walked in the room.

“It was a nice kiss.” He couldn’t resist planting the seed. Because he knew how the red kryptonite affected Clark now, and that meant there was at least some glimmer of hope that he had feelings for Lex he couldn’t root out and dispose of. No matter how much he might have wanted to. “Besides, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

Clark sucked in a deep breath. “It is a psychic link.”

Lex shrugged a shoulder. “Yes. I…I’m the one that needs to be sorry, Clark.”

“No.” The syllable is sharp and short. “After what I –”

“My training was to ensure that I wouldn’t unconsciously influence you like that again.” Lex still felt like breaking out in a sweat every time Clark brought up that night by the fire. He didn’t know how to tackle it. There was no strategy that could perfectly encapsulate every element, and real vulnerability felt far from being an option.

“Really?” Clark’s face was cautiously blank.

“Really.”

“So…what are you going to do with me now, Lex?”

Clark looked genuinely nervous, but the way the question came out had a certain coyness to it. If Lex didn’t know better…no, if Lex was better. If he was a better man, he wouldn’t think that.

“I’m going to let you go. If I determine that you’re a threat, I’ll find you and stop you. A word is all it takes. Remember that, Clark,” Lex continued thoughtfully. “Other than that, you’re a free man. Well, alien.” He laughed.

“That can’t be it.”

“What, disappointed?”

“You went to all this trouble. And now you don’t want anything to do with me? I wasn’t born yesterday, Lex.”

“There is one thing. Kara, what happened to her?” Lex waited to see if he would have to use his powers to make Clark answer honestly.

“That thing wasn’t Kara,” Clark answered, having evidently decided that since Lex knew everything else now, he might as well know this too. “It was Brainiac. Milton Fine? He’s dead now.”

Hence why Kara never showed. Lex closed his eyes and sighed. “Do you think they offer personal judgment classes like they do for anger management?”

Against all the odds, Clark quirked a smile. It didn’t last.

“So what, we go back to how things were, except if you don’t like how I’m conducting myself you come and turn me into your lap dog? Aren’t you angry at me?”

“Of course I am.” Lex only felt tired, though. So much of his anger at Clark had fallen away when he’d made Clark tell him the truth. When he’d realized it didn’t fucking mean a thing to know it now, not when he’d always wanted Clark to tell him of his own free will. When he’d realized there was no way for them to ever be anything approximating friends again, if he could never know how much of Clark’s mind was his own, and how much was Lex’s.

There were only two reasons left for him to hate Clark.

The first was simple, justified. Clark had abandoned him. Lex had tried to keep the friendship afloat for so long, had poured and poured himself into it. Clark had never tried nearly as hard. Why would he? He had other people in his life, people that cared about him. People that were easier to be around than Lex. But he’d given up on Lex, and he’d given up on him before his truly inexcusable acts, which was what hurt. He didn’t even know if Clark knew what he’d done to Lana.

The second was more complex, and far less fair. It wasn’t really Clark’s fault that Lionel had chosen a visitor from another planet over his own son since the time he was a child. As impossible as it was to live up to a prophesied figure with otherworldly powers, Lionel would probably have chosen a shrimp over Lex if it came down to it. Or he would’ve said he was going to, to get Lex to try harder, to ensure he was wrought into something greater than he was.

Maybe he can rekindle some of that white hot rage after all, remembering when Clark told him he should’ve tried harder and then Lionel would’ve trusted him.

Clark would never understand. It was just one thing in a long line of things he needed to accept and move on from.

God, how he wished Clark could understand.

“We can’t just not talk about what happened.”

Lex crossed his arms. Crossed one ankle over the other for good measure. “What do you want us to say?”

“Say you hate me. Say I violated you, and seeing me makes you sick. Say you’ll never trust me again. Say anything, for fuck’s sake Lex, just please say something!”

“I can’t tell you any of that.”

Lex just wanted Clark to leave, so he could drown his morose thoughts of Lionel’s faith in Clark’s innate goodness with bourbon. Maybe stick an ice pack over his eyes. He carefully built a wall around the thought in his mind, so it couldn’t reach out with sticky fingers and push Clark out the door.

“Why not?” Clark demanded.

“Don’t you already know?” A replay of what Kara had said to him. Clark was blocking it out, just like he’d done with Clark’s identity as the traveller. Refusing to peek through the lacy, transparent wool Clark had attempted to pull over his eyes for so long.

Mulishly, Clark started reasoning it out aloud. Like it was an arithmetic problem, and Lex would leap in and correct him if he made a mistake. “You…you wanted me to kiss you in your bedroom.”

Lex swallowed and nodded his assent. Why did it feel like he was admitting to a crime? That old guilt, of realizing he wanted someone so much younger than him, had never really faded. Even though heavens knew, Clark was grown now.

“You wanted me to do more than kiss you.”

Lex spread his hands out in lieu of a response.

“And what I said, that was what you wanted to hear, too.”

Ouch. He hadn’t been expecting that. He picked at an invisible speck of dirt under his fingernail. “I suppose.”

“Lex, did you want – I mean, before, did you – you can’t have –” Clark fixed him with a pleading gaze, and Lex can read the message in it all too well. Please, God, I can’t get this wrong. I can’t say this out loud and have it wrong.

Lex isn’t going to help him out.

“You can’t have wanted what I did to you.”

“Not every aspect of it, no.”

Clark nodded, shame rising up scarlet in his face. “You wanted…the sex?” he asked, voice rising to an uncharacteristically high pitch.

Lex clenched his jaw. “Yes,” he admitted in a low voice.

Clark nodded, like now he had it all figured out.

“But not the fight.”

“It was hardly much of a fight,” Lex protested mildly. Not a fair one, anyway. Clark was too strong for that. And god damn if he doesn’t feel a traitorous flutter at that notion. “But sure. Not the fight.”

Clark nodded again. “Not the…the pain.”

Interesting. So Clark could perceive the distinction between the two sets of actions.

Lex didn’t say anything. This felt worse than being caught by Lionel, still high on amphetamines, brandishing a picture of Lex’s foursome in the back of a club that he had apparently had to pull from six separate newspaper columns at 5 in the morning.

“Tell me you didn’t want the pain,” Clark insisted.

“You’ve hit on another thing I can’t tell you.”

Clark’s eyes glazed over. His hands swung loosely by his sides.

Lex took pity on him then, if only to head off an incoming panic attack. With his newfound armoured mental discipline, he pushed Lionel out of his mind and let himself warming to the task of giving Clark Kent an education he wouldn’t receive anywhere else: like the old days. Clark wouldn’t understand, at least not yet. But he’d give him the explanation anyway. The benefit of the doubt, perhaps.

“I like that kind of thing, Clark. Other people do, too. I have for years. I enjoy submitting to my partner.” Lex talked delicately, like this was the most important task he could undertake. “And there are people who like doing what you did, too. People who enjoy domination. Sadism. There are typically discussions beforehand, and it can be highly mutually satisfactory if –”

Clark’s face shuttered and he held up a hand. “Don’t try and spin this.”

“I’m not spinning anything,” Lex said, slightly offended.

“Okay, I…I get that you like it. Being hurt. But you’re not going to convince me it’s normal.”

“Not normal. Deviant, if anything. But a few have made an argument for ‘natural.’ The parts of the brain that process pleasure and pain – not to mention sex and disgust – are remarkably and inextricably linked.”

“You shouldn’t let someone do that to you, Lex. Not me, not anyone, Jesus.” Clark’s long black eyelashes fluttered like they were trying to persuade tears to stay in a land far far away. “I know you’ve had a hard time, I know maybe these things are normal, natural, whatever you want, in your world, but it’s…”

Then Clark goes for the kill.

“It makes me sad, Lex.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You shouldn’t want to be hurt. It can’t be healthy for you. Lex, don’t look so mad, I’m just. Worried?”

Lex opened his mouth, but failed to come up with anything original.

“I mean, isn’t it maybe the sort of thing you should try getting some help for?”

“Therapy?” Lex’s mouth formed a sour pucker over the word.

“Yeah,” Clark offered helplessly.

“I would’ve thought you’d just double down and tell me I deserved it.” Lex gave him a Cheshire cat grin. If he was going to get kinkshamed by the guy that dommed the shit out of him three weeks ago, he wasn’t going to play fair. “Wasn’t that the message you wanted to get across? When you came to see me after my father died – that in your eyes and in his eyes and in everybody’s eyes I’m no good?”

He'd meant to keep building the sentence, an iron tower of spite to crash down and squarely trap Clark. But the unexpected honesty in the sentiment winded him, making him stop abruptly.

Clark was reaching for his hand, and oh God, he wasn’t drawing it away. Why was he trembling? He hadn’t meant to tremble. Was he making Clark comfort him? He felt like heaving at the thought. Had he let his walls slip down?

No. No. Safely sealed up. All contained.

He stared at Clark’s fingers circling his wrist suspiciously, as if they might be part of a mirage.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Order me to tell the truth, then.” Stupid, innocent Clark.

“I don’t want to!” Lex yelled.

Clark murmured, “I was really angry.”

“When we met, who could’ve guessed my father would come to mean so much to you,” Lex intoned bitterly. What kind of divorce had you losing your father instead of just the house and the dog?

“I was angry you did something you couldn’t come back from.”

Lex stared at the carpet. The words sounded so true that he couldn’t bring himself to ruin the illusion with a visual inspection.

“I feel like I belong on the bottom rung of hell for what I did to you, okay?”

Lex’s nausea returned rapidly as he realized Clark was once again, apologizing for fucking him roughly, instead of acknowledging the real ways he’d hurt Lex.

“And you should know…you should be with someone who doesn’t hurt you. You should…want that. And know you deserve it, you know?”

Lex shot him a raw glance. He wanted to say, ‘I’ve never known anything else.’ But Clark would radically misapply that again to only the physical aspects of their exchange.

He felt so young right now. The knowledge that who he really wanted was Clark blazed through him painfully. There were so many hopeless questions he’d leave unspoken.

Could you be that person? Could you turn back into someone who doesn’t know exactly where to aim to break this cold, cold heart? Oh, and could you tie me up and spank me on the weekends. Thanks.

Clark would never, ever understand.

“I’ve had lots of sex where no one hurt me, Clark. I think you should be spending a little less time judging my desires, and a little more time taking in the fact that that was what you wanted the most. I’m not an idiot, Clark. Do you want me to make you tell the truth about how much you fucking liked it?”

With a single beat of wind, Clark was gone.

Chapter Text

CLARK

“Smallville, you look like one of those little old ladies who sit in the corner of the care home waiting for someone to visit them until they die,” Lois said by way of a greeting.

It was his mistake for not calling Chloe before stopping over at the apartment. He’d been stewing in his own thoughts too deeply to think about it, and now he was faced with Lois instead.

“You’re coming to the city with me,” she announced, jabbing her finger at him.

“I really can’t, Lois,” Clark demurred.

“Remind me again of the last time your life had anything resembling excitement in it, Clark?”

If anything, his life had contained far too much excitement lately.

“I just need a night to myself,” he said, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets.

That right there was the fatal mistake.

“You can have the night to yourself at a bar, with me. And friends. You can dance out whatever’s crawled up your ass lately.”

His ass really wasn’t the problem.

“Fine,” he sighed. He was really only in search of a distraction anyway. If Lex insisted he wasn’t going to take the reigns any time soon, he might as well let Lois for the night.

He sat on the corner of the bed while she finished her makeup, swiping something silver and sparkly onto her eyelids and fussing with a very black stick of mascara.

“Want to talk about it?” she offered, smacking her lips together once she’d spread a delicate bronze gloss across them.

“I don’t even know what I’d say.” Clark confessed.

“Okay.” She grabbed her purse and hustled him out the door.

Pulling out from the curb, she asked, “Want to talk at all?”

Clark shrugged, a little confused by the question.

She smiled at him, and flicked the radio on. “Good, because I was kind of looking forward to some uninterrupted tunes time.”

She floored the gas the whole way over, and hummed along when a song she knew came on. Clark was obscurely grateful for the way she was treating everything. No matter how they bickered, she was a good friend.

The first bar was dark inside, with black walls and exposed wooden rafters in places it made no sense for them to be, but it had a mellow atmosphere that relaxed Clark. Lois led him to a booth in the corner that made up half an octagon, and introduced him to the group.

To Lois’ credit, they were all friendly faces and outstretched hands. She’d met most of them in the course of following up leads for work, and it seemed like a few of them lived together and had brought one or two others along. No one asked him any difficult questions, and he was able to melt into the background after a while, offering occasional comments that they met with smiles.

The second bar was brighter, with 80’s music and a big IPA selection racked up in bottles on the wall. But the third bar was more of a club, and he could feel the music pulsating from downstairs when they walked in.

“You know, Lois, I’m not sure –”

Her grasp on his upper arm was extremely firm. “Come on, Smallville. You’re such a scaredy-cat. It’s not so bad: it’s even in your colours.”

Very funny. Red walls with blue lights everywhere.

“If you don’t want to dance, stand at the bar and bop your head a little like you have ears. Maybe you’ll meet someone to talk to. Or more.” She waggled her eyebrows at him.

“Lois, I’m not trying to find a hookup,” he protested, buying them two of whatever cocktail Lois had requested while stretched all the way across the bar.

“But maybe one’ll find you anyway! At this point, I wonder if a rebound might not do you some good. Lots of lovely ladies here tonight,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Lovely fellas, too, if that’s your speed.” She gazed appreciatively at a guy walking by in a tank top.

Clark made a funny noise into his drink.

Lois’ eyes beat back to him appraisingly. The journalism claws were hovering, ready to come out.

“What would make you say that,” he asked, very focused on the single bubble in his drink.

“Nothing really,” Lois said, hand drumming on his shoulder, probably to calm him.

‘Nothing’ probably translated as overheard gossip between Lana and Chloe about the lacking friction between their sheets, with some local speculation about what exactly he and Lex Luthor could have in common, capped off by a Lois Lane special twist of how ever they got to falling out so badly.

“I just figured Smallville might not have been ideal stamping grounds for an experimental phase. I mean, everyone’s got to have one.”

“They do?” Clark asked, stymied.

“Sure,” Lois beat back, taking a big sip of her drink and shivering a little when the alcohol hit her tongue.

“Did you?” He asked without thinking.

“Oh, sure.”

“And? I mean, how was it?” he stammered.

“Fine!” Lois answered brightly.

Fine. Just…fine? Before he could ask anything else, two figures moved towards them. A girl in a white sundress with a sunflower print and big black boots ran up to Lois and embraced her.

“Sorry we’re late!” She exclaimed into Lois’ hair.

“That’s okay! Clark, this is Michael and Sunshine.”

Michael came up and shook his hand. Black hair, black leather jacket, hazel eyes. “Great to meet any friend of Lois’,” he uttered warmly.

“Clark, hi. Hi.”

Sunshine shook both of his hands in hers, long wavy blonde hair shifting with the movement and brushing his forearms.

“Um, nice necklace.” He said, proud of himself for remembering basic social skills. Maybe Lois was right. Had he had been sequestered off on the farm for too long?

It was an unusual piece, showing up silver in the dim light. It hugged tightly to her neck like a choker, with a big circle and two delicately wrought hearts making up the center.

Lois wheezed ever so slightly behind him.

“Oh!” Sunshine’s hands came up to rest delicately at her throat. “Thank you.” Her smile warmed and deepened as she tilted her head to one side. “Do you have someone who wears one?”

Clark stared, lost.

She frowned. “Not here tonight?” She asked sympathetically.

“I, um. No? It’s just – nice?” Maybe she’d gotten it from a market in Metropolis nearby. Maybe they were a trend or something, and she thought he might’ve bought one for someone.

“Oh,” and she chortled a laugh. “He’s so sweet, Lo. Smalltown, right? We’ve heard about you! I think she said, quote-unquote, the nerdy younger brother I never had.”

“Smallville,” Lois corrected.

“No one knows if I'm younger,” Clark said at the same time. But he was a little warmed by the 'never had' instead of 'never wanted.'

Michael spoke for the first time. “Haven’t you told him what story you were working when we met?”

Lois came up beside him, fixing him with her best ‘do not embarrass me in front of my friends’ look. What she said aloud was, “No, that’s the best bit. I thought I’d save it for when you were here.”

Clark looked at her expectantly, wondering what he was missing.

“Early on, I was looking for different stuff, anything with a bit of pizzazz to distinguish myself. The editor said absolutely not after I got everything together, but I met Michael and Sunshine searching up interviews for an exclusive on the city’s budding kink community. Tragic, really. The good citizens of Metropolis missed out on so much inspiration for how to spice up their lives in the bedroom department.”

There was a buzzing static in Clark’s head, and it was getting louder. “Oh, like, you two are –”

“Michael’s my dom,” she said with a gummy smile. “24/7, baby.”

He rolled his eyes. “That bit only as of a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s. Really cool.” He tried to marshal up some extra words, but realized he only succeeded in staring at them.

“Alright, I’d better take Clarkie for a spin now or he’ll never let me. Lots of Kansas cobwebs to clear out up here,” Lois said brusquely as she whacked his forehead with her hand.

“Um, nice meeting you,” Clark rambled as she dragged him onto the dance floor.

“You too,” Michael softly. He was watching him go, Clark realized as he stuck his jacket on a stool.

“Do not be weird about this,” Lois threatened as she put her hands on his shoulders so they could dance.

“I’m not being weird! How was I meant to know the necklace is – what’s the necklace?”

“Her collar.” Lois rolled her eyes.

Unbidden, an image of Lex in a collar flashes before his eyes.

“I just – I mean. They’re your friends?”

“Yes. They’re great, Clark. You’d like them.”

“I’m sure I would, I mean I do. So he like…what, he orders her around all the time? Isn’t that kind of regressive? You’re not bothered by that?”

“It’s consensual, Clark,” Lois said, lengthening the word as if that’ll get it through his thick skull better. “So, no. It’s not like he’s beating her while she’s trapped in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.”

“But he is. Beating her.” Lois was wrong, the cobwebs weren’t in his head, they were in his mouth, and he couldn’t fucking breathe or say anything right.

“Goddamn,” Lois breathed. “I wouldn’t put it that way. They do what the BDSM scene calls pain play.”

“Like, spanking?” Clark was trying very hard to remind himself to act like someone who’d never barged into Lex Luthor’s house and bloodied him before fucking him on the floor.

“I’m sure they do a lot of different things.”

“It didn’t come up for your article?”

“Of course it did, Clark. I’m just not going to drop literally everything about their sex life to you? I’m sure they’d tell you if you asked.”

He could tell how much she didn’t want him to do that.

They danced in silence for a few minutes as she watched him think.

“But, do you think it’s healthy? I mean, telling someone what to do. Hurting someone who’s meant to be your partner?”

Lois seemed to sense the genuine hesitation behind the question, because she replied kindly. Slowly. And if she was enunciating a bit more than she needed to, he wouldn’t call her on it. “I think it can be. I mean, they’ve really talked about it. That was kind of the point of the article. People have all kinds of attitudes about it without ever asking the people in the relationship if it makes them happy. Society never gets more open-minded if there’s no one to push the envelope.”

Good thing they had Lois Lane, envelope pusher extraordinaire.

Clark made a thoughtful noise somewhere in the back of his throat. “Have you ever –”

Lois laughed. “Nah. Not much, anyway, it’s not really my thing. But you’d be surprised who has. Your Mom once told me about some very interesting ways of repurposing old saddle stirrups –”

“Enough!” Clark squeaked, eyes flaring wide.

Lois laughed, low and throaty. “Alright, you’re on your own from here on out. You’re driving me home, so don’t drink anything else.”

Clark rolled his eyes while she stalked over to the bar to fetch a mojito.

Lois danced for around an hour. He didn’t really know what to do what himself. His eyes kept being drawn back to Michael and Sunshine. The gentle way he led her by the small of her back, the carefree way she twirled when they danced, always trusting him to catch her. The way he looked at her: like she fascinated him. Like her very presence was something of a privilege.

It was very similar to the way Lex always used to look at him. And he didn’t know what to do with that at all.

He made a pretence at dancing for a while, but when two girls started stepping on his shoes trying to dance closer him, he got a coke and hid at the upstairs bar.

Sunshine found him on her way to the bathroom. “Oh hey stranger! We didn’t wig you out earlier, did we?”

“No, not at all,” he said. “I just didn’t know.”

She grabbed a stool and sat by him for a while. She asked him about Smallville and they talked about normal things. She was a vet. She missed the seaside where she grew up. She and Michael met at a concert: the band was The National.

“I think Lois is coming up,” she said as she went to leave him.

“Yeah. Um, hey…”

She nodded encouragingly.

“Does it – does it make you happy?”

His eyes accidentally bouncing back down to her collar were enough to show what he was asking about.

“Oh. Yeah,” she said in a lucid rush. “All my previous relationships…well, when we started exploring this stuff together, it kind of felt like I’d been lost and then I was found and so was he. In a very real way.”

He gulped and nodded. “Thanks. I was just…curious.”

“Sure,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

“Alright, where’s my driver?” Lois asked affectionately as she closed in on the two of them.

“Your carriage awaits, m’lady. Now I know what you really wanted me here for.”

She bumped his shoulder. “You’re an easy mark, Smallville.”

*

Clark cracked his knuckles over the keyboard. Chloe, who woke him up when she called at 8, still didn’t have any leads on a way to break Lex’s mystical control over him. In fact, the ancient Mesopotamian folio that Virgil Swann had previously identified as a likely disguised source of Kryptonian information was missing from the museum, which had previously refused to release it for any amount of money to the members of Veritas. This time it hadn’t been bought: it had been stolen, by a thief who’d left not a single shred of evidence behind them.

“This has Lex’s fingerprints all over it,” she’d said. “He’s looking to close any loop hole that could let you go.”

“Maybe.” Clark had answered. She hadn’t liked that, but she’d let it go.

The word of the day was APOCALYPSE. As in, now that Lex had beaten him – wasn’t the world supposed to end? Weren’t they supposed to have had some epic battle that could’ve destroyed everything? The myth of Sageeth and Naman was awfully fuzzy on what would come after.

Clark rolled his shoulders back. What had Brainiac said to him? That Lex and he were just the latest incarnation of a fantastic… phantasm?…

Wincing, he typed an approximation of the letters into Google.

Phantasmagoria.

An early kind of horror theatre that used analogue devices to project moving images, often of ghosts, witches, and devils. Starting with the invention of the magic lantern, and moving onto other illusion machines like the zoetrope or the ‘wheel of life.’ Clark clicked on a clip. A large metal cylinder with slits to peek through and images printed on the inside, when it spun around the figures in the pictures moved as if of their own accord. Round and round, always coming back to the same place. An animated loop, fashioned by hand.

‘You and your brother-lover are just the latest incarnation of a phantasmagoria that’s been running since time immemorial. Good and evil? Please. It won’t mean a damn in the end.’

Clark crinkled his nose at Brainiac’s description of he and Lex as brother-lovers, but something in the rest of it snagged at him suspiciously. He played the clip of the zoetrope over. The wheel of life.

He’d said ‘good and evil’ like it was some kind of in-joke. Maybe to machines with no sense of morality, it was.

Or maybe the Thing that had seen planets die knew something Clark didn’t.

A few lazy searches on mythological depictions of battles between good and evil turned up altogether too many results to sift through, since every culture seemed to have at least one legend about it, if not multiple.

He clicked on a hyperlink talking about Osiris and Set in ancient Egypt. The gods were brothers, but Set murdered Osiris to steal his throne. He couldn’t be killed using ordinary method, so Set tricked him into a coffin, cut him apart, and scattered the pieces. Clark grimaced. Did Lex have a kryptonite coffin lying around somewhere, or was he already in the trap that would end him?

Not permanently – Osiris was brought back to life. Strangely, Set was also meant to be a protector for the sun god Ra, who kept the Earth alive.

Mouth dry, he clicked the hyperlink at the bottom of the page.

>> List of mythological pairs and consorts.

Okay. Of course Naman and Sageeth were missing, but the list went on and on. In the Hindu tradition, Kali, the goddess of time and death, was matched with Shiva, who would destroy the cosmos and create it again through a dance. Together, they created a divine balance. They weren’t the only opposite but complementary pair: there was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Ares, the god of War, and Hades, who ruled the underworld, with Persephone, the goddess of spring.

If there was a precedent for it…then maybe he could dare to wonder if the Kawatche's legend had gotten parts of it wrong. The end of this world had been prophesied so many times. But here it was, still spinning. Small towns and big cities and limitless oceans.

What if he and Lex weren’t doomed to play out the end as enemies? Would Jor-El have made a device to control him if he was destined to be an exclusive force for good? And didn’t that mean Lex couldn’t belong on the side of pure evil either?

Edward Teague had talked about them as a balance: no good having one, without the other. Didn’t that mean it would’ve been as cosmically catastrophic for Clark to kill Lex, as it would’ve been the other way around?

His head hurt. Chloe was the big brain in the team, but she’d shoot him down and probably make some uncomfortable comment about him trying to slot Lex into the role of his spiritual consort.

Exhausted but cautiously optimistic, Clark glanced around the room behind him and then began researching another, more intimate topic. As it turned out, there were quite a few message boards and educational websites out there on bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism.

Chapter Text

STILL CLARK

Clark was halfway through his fourth cup of coffee and about an hour into pretending he wasn’t half hard in his pants when the signal came through, faint as a whisper at first.

Clark’s eyes unfocused. Did Kryptonians develop antennaes at any point in their adulthood? Because it really felt like one had flipped up from the back of his head, and he was already tuned into the right frequency.

The only noise in the room was the creaking of the ajar window in the slight breeze, but he could hear half-murmured words in his mind. Only snatches, and too indistinct to even make out the language they were in. But what was very clear were the intermittent spikes of longing wired directly to his heart.

Clark stumbled over to lay down on the sofa, suddenly breathless. He rubbed his ribs. The horrible, tugging ache would recede for minutes at a time before breaking back through, and then stopping just as quickly.

What was going on?

He checked the news for solar flares. Nothing.

It was getting dark outside. Before he knew it, he was on his feet. He had to go – he had to be there.

Be where? The impulse faded unhelpfully.

But no amount of wilful obstinance could disguise the likely explanation from him. There was only one man he shared a psychic link with. With trembling fingers, he dialled Lex’s cell. He picked up on the third ring.

“Lex?”

“Clark!”

Lex slurred the single word, and that would’ve been cause for concern if some unidentifiable sensation hadn’t just flared so strongly through his chest that it sent him buckling to the floor.

“Is…something going on?” Clark asked quietly, trying to catch his breath.

“No-o?”

Lex was about as convincing as Clark had been at six years old, telling Martha he had no idea where all the cookies in the jar had gone.

“Where are you?”

“You don’t have to come.”

Cue the blinding, pulsing throb that needled its way across the skin of his stomach.

Then, softly, “The mansion.”

“Thanks,” Clark said raggedly.

He decimated more than a few telephone poles and fences on the way over, as foreign stabs of a fearful excitement tightened the back of his throat.

“What are you doing?”

Lex was lying on his chaise lounge wearing a light pink cashmere sweater, tilting his crystal decanter at an obscene angle to take a sip directly from its opening. He wore his slacks with no belt, and they rode low, exposing a swathe of his lower stomach.

“What did you do to my wall on your way in?” Lex replied, wiping a stray trail of brandy off his chin. He looked astonishingly young, as if the alcohol had swept away every line and ounce of tension that the last few years had spent working into his now slack face.

“It’s just a dent,” Clark bristled. Then, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Shall we make a list? Or maybe you could just hand me yours, and we could compare notes.” Lex slit his eyes at him, catlike.

An intangible fist of unease appeared in Clark’s gut, but it wasn’t from him.

“No, Lex. I can feel you. Through the bond.”

Very carefully, Lex recompiled his limbs and drew himself up to sit straight as an arrow. “What?”

“Something’s going on with you.”

“What do I feel like?”

Clark didn’t think ‘desperation and yearning and the edge of a cliffside’ was the answer Lex wanted to hear. “A lot of it was sensations. Hard to interpret.”

Lex yawned, fist coming up half a second too late to cover his teeth, the pink inside of his mouth. The inside of the mouth that Clark’s tongue badly wanted to remember.

“I’m very sorry. It appears I somewhat burned through my ability to hold up the barrier around my thoughts. I’ll work on ways to extend it.”

Clark had an inkling that those ways would involve experiments beyond the boundaries of science, and probably procedures that no one should put their brain through.

“If I had to guess,” Clark ventured. “I’d say it felt like you were lonely.”

Lex’s gaze was burning, and then it was dimming because oh man, that was an honest-to-god tear, and Clark expected to see steam rising up from the reaction any time now. A dragon, aghast to find itself tamed.

“Lex…”

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Lex sulked. “You want to know what I was doing? Take one look around. And then you’ll be gone, and so will that horrible hang dog face you’re putting on.”

Several flipboards, big pieces of paper with black ink scribbled all over, stood side by side with a giant map laid over the table. Lex had dug out old toy models from somewhere, because the map was populated with ships, planes, and toy soldiers, with arrows and dates scrawled by them. Printed stacks of paper sat over Alaska, with columns of phone numbers and what could only be names jumbled in coded symbols beside them.

In the darkest corner of the room, glossy pictures Lex shouldn’t have and information on every power Clark had were tacked to a board, connected by red strings.

“What is this, Lex?”

“Oh, isn’t it obvious? It’s my plan to take over the world. The solar system is set up in another room of the house.” Lex spoke coquettishly, but that wouldn’t be worth a damn if he was serious.

“Using me.” It wasn’t a question.

“Who else?” Lex sputtered a laugh.

“World domination seems like a job you wouldn’t want to be drinking on.”

Lex swung his head to face away with a force that would’ve warned at aggression, if Clark didn’t already know it was the heaviness of liquor at work.

“Well, that’s my problem.”

“So what, you’ll start tomorrow when you sober up?” Clark crouched down in front of Lex gently, one hand resting on the jacquard cushion by his knee.

Lex sucked in a breath. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Clark asked mildly. This was everything he’d been afraid of. But nothing he’d felt through the link had pointed at bloodlust or a gluttony for power.

Lex mumbled something.

“What?”

“I’m impotent.”

Clark coughed, and sank down to a knee to stabilize himself. “Um, Lex…I don’t think…I mean, when we…you definitely, ah –”

“Oh Christ, not in the literal sense.” Lex smacked his knee with the back of his hand, oh so lightly. “Didn’t they teach you anything about metaphors in those highschool English classes of yours?”

Clark tried not to smile, but Lex was looking at him again, and that could only be good.

“And this is a metaphor for what exactly?”

“I can’t even get it up for the conquest of my lifetime,” Lex stated mournfully. He gestured around the room. “It’s all completely feasible over a six to eight year timespan. My blueprint has a very high probability of success. I have everyone I would need in my back pocket, or I have the people I’d need to get to them in my back pocket. I have more power than any military general throughout the course of time ever dreamt of. I have nothing holding me back anymore. And I have you.”

“Okay?” Clark murmured. He was worried about where this was going, despite Lex’s languid demeanour. What if they made Viagra for dreams of dominion over man?

“It wasn’t even fun, Clark,” Lex moaned. “Plotting it all out. It should’ve been thrilling. It is thrilling. But I’m not thrilled. So you can see, impotent.”

“Well, you know I’m rooting for Team No Global Conquests.” Hesitantly, Clark stroked a hand over Lex’s shoulder.

“No, you don’t get it.” Lex stilled, but it wasn’t at Clark’s touch.

Clark waited for him to explain. All he got was silence.

“You should go,” Lex said.

“No.”

“I’ll make you.”

“Signs point to no,” Clark told him with a sheepish grin. He just wished Jor-El’s link between them would provide him with more than Magic 8-Ball answers to Lex’s current state.

Lex swallowed, and laid flat on his back with his face to the ceiling.

“I don’t have anything else,” was what he said.

In the aftermath, a shudder like a building caving in ran through Clark. Fuck, but Lex was the source of that too.

“There’s nothing left. There never really was anything else. You know, I had a dream once. Where I was – where I made different choices. But that wasn’t the life I led. Your father was right about me Clark. Hell, my father was right about me.” Lex twitched like a big centipede had crawled over his skin when he said that.

“No, Lex.”

“You were a teenager and even then I could only fool you for so long,” Lex mused, shifting onto his side.

“Were you only ever my friend to investigate me?”

It’s not what Clark meant to ask, at all, but the remorse and condescension in ‘fool you’ is enough to pour cold ice water all over the back of his neck, to remind him of the first time he thought things were really irreparably broken between them. How hotly ashamed he’d felt at being so thoroughly taken in, and how rejected.

The noise Lex made was one of indescribable shock. “No! How could you think that?”

Clark hung his head. “Pretty easily, if you look at it from my point of view, Lex.”

“At first, my curiosity about the accident and my gratitude to you for saving my life felt compatible. Once things started to not add up, and we were already close…if anything, I investigated you because I was your friend. You were the only person in this ridiculous backwater that saw me as anything other than bad news, but you were lying to my face. How could I go on not knowing why?”

“Now you know.”

Lex ran a finger down Clark’s bicep. Clark wasn’t sure why the simplest touches from him felt like they invented new nerves that no one else had ever woken up before.

“I’ve done so many bad things, Clark.”

Clark’s eyes flickered closed when Lex hooked his finger in the top button of his shirt. Except there was something important to dissect, still. To pin down before it could wriggle away.

“Fool me how?”

Lex gave a miserable little laugh. “You know. Into thinking I was someone with admirable qualities.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Lex.” Clark leaned down over Lex, forearms laid on the edge of the sofa. “Which is it? You’re angry that everyone thought the worst of you when you didn’t deserve it, or you were bad all along and fooling me?”

Lex swallowed. “I don’t know. I could put out a million dollar reward for anyone who can come up with the answer if it’ll please you.”

“Have you done bad things, or have you always been all bad, Lex?” Clark pressed. Maybe because he desperately needed the answer, too. Maybe because he was dying trying to hold back from placing all his bets on one side of the table.

“Do you have any more secrets, Clark? I could really use a new doomed quest to go all out on.”

Clark grimaced. But when he surveyed Lex, he saw that he was shaking. When he enclosed him in his arms and steered him upright, drawing his legs up to kneel on either side of him and holding him to his breastbone, it wasn’t a decision. It was automatic. But there weren’t any phantom hands pushing him to do it, no invisible ropes binding him to the course of action. It was all him, Clark realized.

“Don’t say things like that,” he whispered.

Lex wasn’t content to be held, though. “Clark, I don’t want this,” he rasped.

Clark tightened his fingers into his sides. That wasn’t completely true, or Lex could’ve repelled him with his mind.

“Do you know what I want?”

Clark was lost in the bags under Lex’s eyes, how wan his skin looked. He’d lost weight too. “Reply hazy – try again later?”

Lex laughed, eyes drifting closed. He twisted so he could get his mouth on Clark’s neck. Embarrassingly, Clark’s pelvis twitched up straight away from the silky wet seam of Lex’s lips.

“Lex. You’re not…doing good tonight. And you’re drunk.”

“Hmm. So?”

“It isn’t…” Responsible, he thought.

“Right? So morally clean it squeaks? Oh let me guess, it’s not what you want.”

Lex thrust their hips together to make that particular point.

“You’re not in a good place right now.”

As if in Clark’s most hushed subterranean thoughts, he hadn’t been dreaming of the feel of Lex against him again. As if he thought he’d live if Lex moved, leaving only empty air to encircle him.

“Why don’t you show me a worse place,” Lex muttered darkly, the lust undisguised on his face.

Except that there was something else worming under the surface there too, something that terrified Clark.

“Why don’t you put that red wrist cuff on again and you won’t have any doubts left about whether I’m bad or not. Come on, I know you’ve been dying for a reprise.” Lex bit down sharply on the cord of his neck.

His traitorous blood had started to rush down to plump up his cock.

“Hurt me,” Lex said, then kissed him. “Hurt me.” Kissed him again. Mouthing across his cheek, he said, “Don’t you think I deserve it?” He swallowed Clark’s denial, sucking it away with his tongue. “I know you want to. Your body isn’t half as sanctimonious as you are.”

Clark pushed him away, palm flat to his chest. “You can’t use me like this,” he panted. “I’m not going to be the knife you use to gut yourself like a fish, alright.”

“A country boy to the end, I see.” Lex remarked wryly, like he hadn’t been writhing against Clark begging to be punished only a moment ago.

“I mean it, Lex. I’ll – I’d give you what you wanted. But not like this.” The anxiety hit him after the sentiment was too far gone to retrieve, though he swallowed like it might reel it back in.

“You would,” Lex echoed, unbelieving.

Clark ran his teeth over his lip. “Yeah,” he said, the sound punching out of him softly.

“I could make you hurt me.” Lex commented mutinously.

Clark drew a deep breath. “You could. Don’t.”

“I was never going to,” Lex said quietly.

“I know.”

“I’m a mess the size of Kansas, Clark.”

“It’s not your fault.” Clark said like it was the clearest thing in the world.

He could hear Lex’s jaw click. “What, the screwed up lines my personality tends to run along, or what I’ve done? Because I mean all of it. It’s a mess.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Lex sighed. “How could you possibly believe that?”

It came with a short wave of something remarkably like hope skipping up his spine, yet also like the damp imprint of stepping on someone’s grave. Lex’s feelings again.

“I don’t know. But I knew you.” Silence. “I like to think maybe I still do.”

Lex kissed him, the instant onslaught of ferocity pouring molten between their jaws. Clark moaned into it, hands coming up to Lex’s back, his neck, to draw him in even closer. He could hear Lex’s heart beat, so rapid it was flying, and he could almost feel it, tapping from the inside out through their psychic link.

Lex broke away from him, demanding, “What do you want? Tell me what you want. We’ll do anything.” His hands skimmed and skated all over Clark’s chest.

Lex had the power to make him do anything. And all he wanted was to let Clark call the shots.

Shuddering at the rush that the notion sent to his head, Clark ripped his own shirt off, and slid his palms up Lex’s abdomen.

“Actually, no. Sweater stays on.”

Lex quirked an eyebrow at him.

“You look edible in that,” Clark whispered huskily into his ear.

Only Lex would plan world domination in a pink sweater. Which, no matter how many lilac shirts there had been, he’d certainly never seen him wear while Lionel was alive.

Chasing thoughts of the deceased out of his head by getting the taste of Lex’s Adam’s apple thoroughly soaked into his tongue, Clark palmed Lex’s bulge, gratified at the gasp he gave. Already worked down to the wire, he wouldn’t make Lex wait either.

“Take your pants off.”

Lex stands to obey, unzipping them and letting them fall around his ankles in one clean motion.

“Leave your boxers.”

They were white, loose cotton. More like what Clark would wear than the black silk he’d idly supposed Lex would wear all this time, or like what he’d worn the first time. Lex had never looked so…innocent.

Clark kicked off his sneakers, lifted his hips, and took everything off. Lex licked his lips at the sight of his bare erection.

“Come on. In my lap.”

In his online reading earlier, he’d been worried it wouldn’t feel natural taking the lead when he wasn’t all hopped up on red kryptonite. But it came relatively smoothly. It felt…good. Like it was satisfying a want for him too, not just for Lex. Although his dick thought giving Lex what he wanted was a pretty sweet perk all on its own.

Lex crossed his legs around Clark, linking his ankles behind him. The intimacy of the position quickened his breath.

“Mm, yeah,” he said absently, dipping a finger under Lex’s waistband.

Lex shifted, bumping his clothed cock into Clark’s abs.

“Shh,” he said, making sure he’s kissing Lex again when he takes the long outline of him in his hand, sounds like syrup slinking into his mouth.

“So hard for me,” he affirmed.

“Clark,” Lex said breathlessly. Looking at him like he might be a miracle.

“Wet, too.” Clark pressed a thumb to the head of his cock, touching where Lex had dampened the fabric.

“God, please.” Lex mumbled, slumping his head onto Clark’s shoulder.

“Please what?” Circling the head with a thumb and forefinger, as much as the cotton between them would allow.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Lex rumbled into him. “Please, more. Please, less. Please, whatever you want.”

His own cock jerked, spilling precum onto Lex’s bare skin.

Lex flicked his eyes up, considering him in that way a hawk has when it sizes up the mouse it intends to swallow whole. But all that happened was him peppering kisses all along Clark’s hairline, saying, “You like that.”

“You don’t even know,” Clark said, heart raw, dick hard. “You don’t even know,” he repeated reverentially, plunging his fist into Lex’s underwear and clasping him in his hot palm.

Lex moaned, legs tightening around him. He didn’t have any leverage, not like this. It was all down to Clark, who stroked him slow and tight.

“Fuck.” His length felt glorious in Clark’s hand.

He nibbled at Lex’s earlobe, a serious ache settling in his own cock, all the way down to his sack. God, but he wanted to finish inside Lex again. Lex’s moans were rich and distressed, interspersed with Clark’s name: with satisfaction, Clark realized he was already trying not to come.

“Shit, let me – let me suck your cock,” Lex rambled.

Clark’s quads clenched, rutting up against his lover. “Yeah,” he breathed. “Wait – you too.”

Lex waited amicably to see what he meant.

“Both at the same time. Do you want to be on top or on the bottom?” Clark expanded.

Lex did a remarkable job of scrubbing out the surprise that Clark Kent was suggesting they 69, but it was still visible for a flash.

So what, it was on his mind because one of the kink websites he’d found had strayed more into gay porn than it had a how-to guide.

“Bottom,” he said breathily.

“Sure?” Clark hesitated.

“I want you on me. And I’m pretty sure between the two of us, I have more experience with deepthroating.”

Clark was bigger than Lex just about everywhere. He was worried about pinning him down, about the possibility of gagging him and not realizing straight away if he wasn’t in complete control.

“Or are you going chicken on me after all?” Lex asked, shoving his hip to get him to move.

“Who put you in charge?”

The words rushed his lips, and he grasped Lex’s jaw, dragging his head from one side to the other. Lex followed smoothly, effortlessly, letting himself be moved. The exaltation in his eyes grew.

“Fuck,” Clark said again. “Okay. On your back.”

Lex looked like a painting, insolently inviting, all spread out. Clark couldn’t wait to get his mouth on all that pink flesh. He settled in over Lex, bracing himself on his forearms, groin hovering over Lex’s head. Lex tapped his butt so that he shifted down a few inches.

“Yeah,” Lex muttered before licking his blood-filled cock.

Clark groaned, and ducked his head down to spit on Lex, smoothing it out with his hand before he circled his lips around him. Lex’s hips jerked and he slid further onto Clark’s tongue. Salty, hot velvet. Immense sense of rightness.

Lex’s hands were pulling him down, down, so Lex could swallow him in deeper.

Clark let himself be moved, but he pulled off. “You gotta – you gotta tap me if it’s too much. Two hard taps, OK?”

Lex did something he thought was nod with his cock between his lips.

Clark sank back down on him, and then they were both inside one another at once. No one knew anything, because this was what a perfect union looked like, forget the church and forget the steeple. It was all heavenly wet suction and Lex’s pulse in his veins and Clark had to grab the backs of Lex’s thighs to ground himself. He’d started thrusting shallowly, only realizing it when he heard Lex moan in approval.

Clark never wanted it to end. Which of course, meant they were coming up close. He took Lex in his hand, moving to bite at his thighs. He was grateful for their height difference being minimal: the physics of this never could’ve worked with someone like Lana. He was a little tall as it was, but he arched his back like a cat to make the angle right.

Lex muffled needy yelps into his flesh, tongue faltering at its task.

“That’s it,” Clark said. “You’re doing so good, baby.”

He drew his hips up, removing himself from Lex’s gorgeous heat.

“I want to hear you when you fall apart,” he told him before diving down once more, willing his throat to relax to take as much of his dick as he can.

“Clark,” Lex recited brokenly. Clark sucked harder, making love to Lex with his lips, his tongue.

Lex gushed bitter semen into his mouth, thrusting across his tongue and hitting the back of his throat. He got loud as he rode it out, the vibrations of his hoarse cries transmitted to Clark’s slick, sensitive member where Lex pressed his face into it, into his pelvis.

Clark hummed helplessly, trying to swallow which only wrung further convulsions from Lex. When Lex finally pulled him off, whimpering at the sensitivity, Clark accidentally dribbled strings of come back onto his length. Sighing, he shifted carefully off Lex, kneeling on the floor to clean him up. He shamelessly batted his lashes at Lex as he licked away the mess.

Lex’s eyes were heavily lidded, his tongue licking idly at the back of his teeth as he watched Clark.

Clark stood over him, moving to grip his own cock.

“Clark,” Lex complained.

“You want something?” Something conspicuously like happiness was settling into Clark. No antennaes needed. It was all his.

“I want to suck you.” Lex sat up. The hand he ran up Clark’s thigh had him a finger’s breadth from the edge.

“I want to come on your face,” he heard himself say. He was surprised at how correct the words were.

A bolt of surprise, then a sleepy smile like Lex was the cat that got the cream.

“I think this negotiation can come a mutually advantageous outcome, Clark.”

Clark stepped right up close and spread his legs. “Yeah, Lex. Do it…suck me.”

Lex licked his lips.

“Just your mouth. Your hands can go anywhere else,” Clark proclaimed.

That got him a twilight glance full of intrigue. Lex offered his mouth, open and willing, and let Clark slide himself in. He touched Clark’s legs all over, up from the bones of the ankle to the muscles of his calves, then swirling over the expanse of his thighs.

“Lex,” Clark gasped.

Lex bobbed his head as Clark jerked himself. The pleasure was racketing up his spine, slick warmth and soft press of skin and Lex always asking for more with the way he coddled him in his mouth. He could hardly think straight. Lex’s hands found his ass, pulling him in closer, taking him until his lips brushed against Clark’s first knuckle. Throat fluttering around the head of his cock like the most irresistible question he’s ever been asked.

Eyes squeezed nearly closed, Clark tapped Lex’s cheek. Lex leaned back, face tilted up to him. Waiting.

“Fuck,” Clark cried. The second Lex’s desirous gray eyes met his, hand only barely having begun to move again, he was orgasming like there was no tomorrow left for the world. He shot pearl strings onto Lex’s face: pink lips, jaw, forehead, cheekbones and the perfect dusky shadows they cast.

Lex’s lids were closed in a picture of perfect surrender while Clark shook apart in the ecstasy of marking him.

Clark tenderly dabbed anything near Lex’s eyes away before collapsing onto him. Since he caught him unawares, they crashed backward, tangled together.

“Mm.” Clark nuzzled against the side of Lex’s head.

“Tissues?” he asked.

After fussing around in the pool his slacks made on the floor, Lex proffered a handkerchief. He was quiet as Clark cleaned his face. But Clark could feel the sickening trickle of questions returning to his bones.

“Don’t think so loud,” Clark tried. He runs his thumbs over Lex’s cheekbones, cupping his face in his hands. “Close your eyes.” He kissed Lex’s eyelids then. “I’m gonna get you some water.”

Lex regarded him with a modicum of suspicion. When he came back, he commented dryly, “I’m not sure blowjobs require aftercare, Clark.”

For the second time this weekend, Clark felt like an idiot kid from Kansas who’d gotten completely out of his depth. Horse before the cart, suppressed wants made manifest before he’d gained any real experience in the arena.

“’s not your decision,” he settled on experimentally, tipping the glass so Lex drank from it in his hands.

Lex blinked at him in what was undeniably appreciation. The experiment had reached statistical significance.

“What would you like?” Clark asked carefully, threading his hands under Lex’s sweater so he can work his fingers into his tense traps.

“Just take me to bed. We can sleep.” Lex’s cadence bore a deadness that reminded Clark that a few hours of doing sort-of-okay at negotiating these boundaries didn’t make up for an entire night of flagrant, animalistic disregard for them.

He supposed he was lucky that it had been Lex. Not that it ever could’ve been someone else. But no one other than Lex would ever have viewed that as something he didn’t need to be forgiven for. Which was dangerous, and Clark wouldn’t give up on changing it, either. But…nonetheless.

They wound up chest to chest in bed, limbs interlinked. But Lex was nowhere near sleep by the time Clark drifted into oblivion, and Clark was trying to pretend he couldn’t feel something new stirring in Lex’s thoughts, something massive with a significance he could only guess at, some kraken recently unchained.

Chapter Text

LEX

Lex waited for the first wash of morning light across the floor to make his way out. He’d spent all night trying to absorb the feeling of Clark, to siphon off the warmth of him and store it up for a long, cold, lonely winter. To remember the soft tickle of his black hair, the strength in his hands even in sleep, or the slow kickdrum of his heart pulsing pressed to Lex’s back. There was a good chance this was the last time he’d get to feel any of it.

It was simple to set everything in motion. A small piece of green meteor rock retrieved from his shielded safe, two needles. One to draw Clark’s blood, the other to delicately pump a heavy enough sedative for four horses into his neck. Even his veins were pretty, Lex thought sombrely as he regarded his wrist. Strong sinews, finely crafted bones, but his veins, those beguiling sea green highways that carried his very life’s blood faithfully to his heart and back, keeping him warm, keeping him breathing.

Lex swallowed.

One trip to the wine cellar, the one place he’d been sure Clark wouldn’t go after his debauched display yesterday.

No, it hadn’t been premeditated. At least, not to that extent.

Lex was mortified, actually. He’d thrown himself at Clark like the second girl he’d ever slept with: fresh out of the psych ward, unbeknownst to him. He’d picked her up hitchhiking, in days of lesser discretion and much greater naivete, and she’d ridden him while sticking his hand to her breast with tears in her eyes. Telling him to ignore them threatening to get out of the car and walk onto the train tracks if he made a big deal out of it. She’d sobbed when she finished, and had him come all over her soft small stomach before disappearing out the car door and down the street to god knows where.

Lex’s cracks had been all showy and visible last night. Begging Clark to hurt him had been a new low, let alone making it obvious that it was because he couldn’t cope with what was going on in his own head. If he’d been smart about it, he could’ve just seduced Clark into it, never a word about what he needed. But Clark was more acquiescent than he’d thought, less stuck up his black hole of nuclear family morality than he’d been the last time they spoke.

It didn’t matter. What they’d done had been perfect. Lex resented that, the way Clark had sensed what he really wanted deep down. He wondered if Clark had felt how close to the edge he was. How the meaninglessness of everything in his life swam up around him and threatened to extinguish any force of will he had left.

Everything except Clark. But Clark was the thing he’d done the most wrong.

An oak chest, lead-lined apart from the single keyhole opening, contained the Newton’s Cradle from Lionel’s office. Lex darted a finger over the smooth metal. It had been remade.

One drive to Metropolis, stretching out forever like no matter how far right he bumped the needle on the speedometer, the familiar curves of the road would only carry him backwards, snail-like.

One short set of stairs to board the private jet. One take-off that felt like absolutely nothing, making him wish for a few bumps to make the transition between tarmac and air beneath them feel tangible.

Eleven hours to think about what he’d done and what he was about to. Hands clasped, staring up at the ceiling. Feet out long on a wheeled leather ottoman. Uncomfortable tremulous feeling in his throat and sinuses from fighting off tears.

He’d never been so consistently near tears in his entire adult life. Was it since Clark? Or was it since Lionel, as if his overbrimming well finally thought it was safe to flood on home?

A descent and landing that made his stomach feel queasy and too light for his body.

The Fortress was a wasteland. Lex had to pick his way through the giant littered shards of ice with extreme care.  He’d hate to twist an ankle out here. As far as the eye could see, it was a ruined crash of columns strewn over one another: a Kryptonian Pompeii.

But what he needed would find him. He’d opted for a parka this time, and boots with crampons to pierce the hard, glassy surface beneath the snow.

Lex could hear the buried orb singing to him, on a frequency only he could hear, when he got close. He pulled a blow torch and pick axe out of his duffel bag and set to work, the blue flame providing much-needed light as the sun slipped behind the horizon.

“What are you doing?”

His chest tightened. Clark.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I fucking guessed that from the shakes and double vision I had when I woke up. Your room gets a lot of sun, Lex.”

Lex closed his eyes. “Well, south-facing sells.”

Had he made that mistake on purpose, trying to give himself an out? He wondered. The full sun on Clark’s naked skin would’ve enabled him to burn through the sedative in record time.

He could see immediately from the set of Clark’s face, the way the skin around his blue eyes clenched and trembled, that he was furious. And incredibly hurt.

“You could’ve ordered me to stay away, if that’s what you wanted. Why would you drug me?”

“Hazarding a guess here, you wouldn’t believe me if I wanted to spare you.” Lex stood and brushed snow off his knees.

“Not now.”

Oh, how it sounded like the words were costing him.

Well, it was costing Lex too.

“You don’t need to be here. It won’t matter – I’m not going to let you stop me.” Except, maybe, that was another reason he’d drugged Clark instead of telling him to stay like a good dog. He couldn’t be talked out of this.

Clark stepped closer. His proximity sent up a pink flare under the ice, and curiously, the orb that had started it all bubbled up and emerged on the surface, melting a slick perimeter around it. Lex gulped and took it in his hand.

“What are you doing, Lex?” A deadened disappointment rang through his tone.

“Why haven’t you asked me to release you?” Lex asked, spinning the glowing sphere on his finger, watching the light show.

“Can you even do that? Isn’t it permanent?” Clark was still moving closer in the corner of his eye, like he was delusional enough to think this approach could really pass for sneaking up on Lex.

“If it wasn’t? What then?”

Clark gave an audible swallow.

Lex tried to wrangle some meaning out of the storms playing in Clark’s gaze. He looked…a lot of things, but one of them was incontrovertibly…scared.

“Are you scared of going back to how things were, Clark?” He asked softly. “Scared of your life swallowing you up, maybe? All that awful, awesome responsibility?”

“Lex, did you ever – I mean – what feelings did you have for me, exactly?”

Did the earth just stop its orbit, and the dizzying slide inside he felt was gravity getting ready to throw him from where he stood?

Lex doesn’t say anything.

“I can’t order you to tell me the truth. I can only ask for it.”

Clark’s hands were outstretched. Lex stretched his neck away from Clark, praying for clarity.

After all the truths he’d leached out of Clark since the night the Fortress fell, he probably owed him one.

“There’s nothing you weren’t to me.” Lex said simply. “But I think it’s commonly agreed that actions speak louder than words.”

Except that there was nothing Lex Luthor did better than lie, because this was the most selfish thing he’d ever do.

He drew the vial of Clark’s blood out of his breast pocket, and with only a single inbreath to prepare himself, pressed his thumb down on the plunger to usher the red drops out onto the surface of the orb.

It cracked in two, revealing a single white tear drop of Kryptonian glass, ethereal light emanating from within.

“Lex!”

“Stay where you are.” Lex ordered him, the words accompanied by a volley of mental arrows.

Clark twisted against the mental restraint, but his feet stayed firmly planted where they were.

Extracting the tear drop from its shattered home, he bent to retrieve the Newton’s Cradle from his duffle. Pausing to glance back at Clark, he said, “Here. Use your heat vision to slice the balls open.”

“N-no,” Clark implored him. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“Do it,” Lex said, the words leaving his mouth with a rush of heat. There was no turning back, and he was calling the shots. He was almost a little sad he hadn’t fully taken advantage of his ability to order Clark around while it lasted.

A beam sizzled through the metal casing on the balls, cutting them neatly in two so they hung open like slack mouths. Hollow but for one.

Lex picked the gold kryptonite arrowhead out of the middle compartment. He’d been pleased at repurposing one of his father’s old possessions to hide the one item that would disassemble everything that Lionel had dedicated his life to.

“Stay away from this,” he said shortly. He saw the command landing and penetrating Clark’s skin in his mind’s eye. “It could take your powers away,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“What’ll it do you?!” Clark threw his shoulders against the invisible wall around him, only to rebound even further back in the snow.

“Shh,” Lex said. Small worries about Clark having wrenched something drifted across his mind. The last distractions of a hanged man, oddly pleasurable in their useless tenderness.

He sliced his palm open with the sharp shard of gold kryptonite, and closed the glowing teardrop in his hand, wetting it, marrying it to the newly sprung blood.

A blinding shaft of light erupted from it, travelling far up into the upper atmosphere, until it could’ve joined one of the constellations as a star.

Lightning wrapped around Lex’s fingers and ran along his arm, all the way to his heart. His whole body juddered and he could feel himself falling. Faintly, he could make out streams of white light flowing to Clark, circling him whole, tearing around his wrists and breaking like chains. He didn’t look like it hurt. He looked like he was bathed in moonlight.

Then everything went black.

*

He awoke in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines and dark, glossy displays. There were no windows in the room and no armchairs for visitors. Clark sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, looking all for the world like a little kid.

If he had to guess, he might be in someone’s top secret superhero medical care facility.

He wasn’t sure whether the relentless beeping of Clark’s voicemail, coupled with angry crackles from one Oliver Queen, confirmed or denied that particular theory.

When he first tried to speak, no sound issued from his throat. After a blinding moment of panic wondering if the ritual had somehow removed his ability to speak, he managed a faint croak.

“Lex!” Clark bolted to his feet and stood over him. “You’re awake.”

“Guess so.”

He didn’t actually feel all that worse for wear, strangely. Or that different.

“All the systems came back saying your test results were normal, but you weren’t waking up.” Clark fidgeted with the corner of Lex’s pillowcase. Close, but not touching him. Of course not. That wouldn’t happen any more. He’d known that going in.

He gazed up at Clark. “Do you think you could take me home?”

“You should probably stay for monitoring,” Clark fumbled.

“Your friend doesn’t sound too pleased about my presence as is.”

A startled flash of fear lanced through Clark’s gaze. Interesting.

“Okay. If that’s what you want. The mansion?”

“No, Clark. My penthouse. It’s on the corner of Fifth and Edison. 13^th floor.”

“Oh.”

Clark scanned him up and down like he was a fragile vase that had to be packed in a particular way to emerge through transit intact.

Lex sat up to prove that he could. He disconnected all the wires attached to him.

Frowning, Clark pulled off his jacket and settled it around Lex’s shoulders, leaving him only in a t-shirt. Then he pulled Lex into his bare arms and sped him home.

“Sorry about your feet,” Clark whispered when he set him down on the plush carpets of his 13^th floor apartment.

“You took all my clothes?” Lex asked. He wondered where the duffel was, or the gold kryptonite that he’d told Clark to stay away from.

“Chloe said we had to quarantine them just in case.”

“Smart girl,” Lex admitted.

“Lex, what the hell did you do?!” Clark’s eyes snapped up to him. There was that old righteousness, and an even older thread of concern.

“Easy. I set you free.”

Clark gulped, following Lex as he padded around. First finding socks, then to the kitchen liquor cabinet.

“Hot toddy?” Lex asked.

“No,” Clark growled.

“Oh,” Lex responded. He poured in the lemon juice, then the whiskey, and draped a tea bag inside the glass mug while he waited for the kettle to boil. “Then the gun after all. Or the sword over the mantlepiece: you always liked that one in Smallville. I do possess an interesting collection of hand axes, but they’re in storage. Or maybe you’ll resort to incinerating me with your heat vision. It’s pragmatic, I’ll give you that.”

Clark stared him down, breathing heavily.

“…your bare hands? How intimate.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Clark grit out.

The kettle whistled, sending steam flooding up around them. Lex watched Clark pour it into his cup for him with one shaking hand.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

Clark reached that same shaking hand out to him and clasped his wrist, the side of his palm. “How could you think that?”

Lex shrugged, trying not to show that Clark’s hand on his felt like the biggest lifeline he’d ever been thrown.

“I took your free will away, Clark. Whatever the tally was between us, that black mark’s too big for the chart. You know, my father gave me a copy of the Art of War for my fourteenth birthday. I think I know when retribution is due.”

Shaking, shaking evermoreso, Clark drew him into his arms.

“No,” he said, resting his chin on Lex’s head.

Lex inhaled him, treasuring his smell, enjoying a moment of perfect weakness before gently pushing him back.

 “There may be some residual effects of our bond still lingering.”

Clark gave him a pained look, like he suddenly understood everything. How Lex prayed he didn’t.

He plopped an ice cube into his mug and returned to the living room, sitting back in a large cream wingback chair.

“How did you dissolve the connection?” Clark asked.

“Your father built a failsafe into his failsafe. It would’ve been insane to create that kind of to-death-do-we-part control over you with no rip cord.”

Lex took a sip of his hot toddy. Perfect, liquid warmth spreading through him. He relaxed a little. Like all of Clark’s soft sympathy wasn’t about to erupt into anger.

“If the human that had taken control of you determined you were no longer an existential threat, they could relinquish their power over you.”

“Just like that?”

Lex cleared his throat delicately. “It required a trade of sorts. Jor-El wanted to ensure that only someone who had the utmost trust in your integrity would complete the ritual. Chloe will tell you all of this, once she successfully intercepts the shipment of the Kryptonian folio back to the museum.”

“What did you trade?” Clark looked pale.

Lex shrugged. “My soul got bound to yours.”

“What?”

“Not – not in a soulmate kind of way. Don’t worry.” Lex waved a hand casually, heart pounding. “The ultimate fate of my soul is now tied to yours. There’s no real effects in this life.”

“What!” Clark exploded.

“The Kryptonians didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Or in reincarnation. So I have no real way of knowing what it means. At the least, it’s clear that if you die, so will I.”

Clark brought his fist down on Lex’s drawer with a loud crack. An enormous split appeared down the middle of it. “You did what,” he breathed.

“It was the only way to let you go.”

Clark sank his head down onto his hand, elbow propped on the broken piece of furniture.

“Lex,” he said haltingly. “You were never very clear on what your feelings for me were earlier.”

Lex wanted to laugh. “Clark,” he said, voice smooth and warm from the whiskey, “I would burn the world for you.”

Clark frowned. Lex decided he would also burn the world for the single crease between his eyebrows. That he loved it more than the world as well.

“You would burn the world for a thousand reasons, Lex.”

Well, that came across like a sharp hit to the jaw. No matter what he did, it was never quite good enough. He never got it quite right.

“What about saving the world?” Clark paced closer. “Would you save the world for me?”

Lex tilted his head up, appraising him. “Maybe I would’ve once.”

“Now?” Clark pushed. “What about now?”

Lex’s face twitched. There were all those tears he’d held back on the plane clamouring to be set free. He’d been split cleanly open. Could Clark really still believe in him so much after everything?

Please, God, say it was so.

Delirium was an underrated emotion, he decided.

But it’d never work, this meeting halfway, if it was only him.

“What about you, Clark? Could you admit that you’re not all daisies and sunshine? Could you shelve your application for sainthood, admit that sometimes you want to burn and crush and rage just like the rest of us? That maybe some days you’d rather skive off than play saviour for the entire planet? Discover that yeah, you have a dark side and it makes you a whole person? That you’re not better than me?” Lex’s voice twisted bitterly at the last query and there it was, his wretched heart dumped out on the floor between them.

“It’s not like I can ignore that I’m capable of violence for the sake of it after what I did to you,” Clark murmured like a quiet confidence. “You’ve felt the brunt of it first hand.”

“Ah.” Feeling the situation spiral rapidly out of control, he winked. “My privilege. Clark…you have to accept it. Or it’ll become a weakness more fatal than any stray meteor rock.”

“Have to accept it like I have to accept you once again recklessly rushing to the Arctic and changing both our lives without fucking asking me once?” Clark whipped his head up, a smoulder in his gaze. “You drugged me, Lex! While we were asleep in bed.”

Lex held his hands up instinctively, but Clark was already stalking up into his personal space, grabbing at the back of his biceps to drag him to his feet, teary-eyed.

“What were you thinking?” he hissed. “You could’ve died.”

It was hard to think with Clark shaking him like a ragdoll in his grasp.

“I’m an alien, do I even have a soul to be bound with yours? Did you even think about that before you pulled the rug out, huh? We don’t even know if I will die, Lex. You know that? You know what that could mean for you?”

Visions of his life being forcibly prolonged while his body sickened and wasted away, stretched far beyond its natural lifespan, presented themselves to him.

“There’s always clones,” he said stupidly.

Clark looked appalled, but the remark managed to stop the shaking.

“You didn’t even ask. Like before. Like always, Lex.”

“That’s not fair.”

Clark sniffed. “I think there could be a different way, Lex. For both of us.”

Lex watched him helplessly.

“Tell me you believe that too.” Clark said, voice needy and low, like one of Lex’s jeweled daggers had pierced through his throat. “Tell me. Tell me we’ll find it.”

The bravery to speak failed him. He could feel the scars on his chest, he and Clark’s twin symbols conjoined on his skin, tingling with strange electricity and the heavy current of too many memories.

Clark kissed him, one slow press of their lips together. Then he walked out. Step by step, no superspeed. He turned back to Lex when he reached the doorframe, his aching glance flung into pieces when Lex didn’t call him back.

Lex flicked on the security cameras and watched Clark take the stairs the whole thirteen stories down, before he was swallowed up by the glowing lights of the Metropolis night.