And SMALLVILLE fic

[bagheera_san]

Man, that was FUN. I've found my peace with Smallville by ignoring it as best as I could for a year. I haven't watched any SV in that time, and managed to forget S6-7 quite well. Never watched S8. This is very much written from a fannish place of canon-does-not-exist, and both the Lex and Clark in here are half fanon and half their DC selves. I don't think anyone will mind ;)

For ladydey who asked for
Five times during the Rift years that Clark thought Lex was seriously Hot (and wished he could allow himself to get with him. Turns out that my definition of srsly hot includes: black leather, law skills, bald woobieness, morally ambiguous supervillainy and a good deal of violence.


1.

This isn't fair. Why can't Lex wear spandex? He's having a psychotic break, dressing up weirdly is practically a tradition for his line of work. He probably wouldn't look hot in spandex. Especially if he chose wear LexCorp colours. Purple and green. He'd probably look like a geek. Yes, like the Riddler, for example. The Riddler hit on Clark once (he's not quite sure, because the pick-up line was a riddle), which proves that not all gay men have good taste. Clark bets that Batman never thinks that the Riddler is hot. Well, probably. Bruce can be a bit odd. It's remotely possible that geeky riddles are way sexy for him. Clark doesn't really want to know. All he wants is for Lex to get a silly, totally unsexy supervillain costume. As long as it's not a creepy clown costume. But no, Lex, even when he's completely out of his mind, the kind of crazy that leads to death-traps and evil laughter, stops at spandex. Crimes against fashion are the one kind Lex won't commit. Instead, he wears leather. Black, tasteful leather. Maybe it's really dark purple, Clark tries to convince himself. But no. It's black. And tight. And shiny.

Clark has to face the truth. It practically leaps into his face. Lex has a nicer butt than Catwoman.

"Why can't you be the kind of supervillain who steals diamonds?" Clark says helplessly.

Fortunately, Lex is completely insane right now, and probably won't remember.

2.

"Lex, we're going to die in a few hours if we don't fight a way to fight them. And you're reading!"

A little less Hermione Granger and a little more MacGyver would by good right about now, Clark thinks inanely. Lex's tone is mild and maddeingly reasonable. "These beings are more powerful than you, Superman. In fact, they're probably close to omnipotent. Even if we escaped this cell, they could find us whenever they please. And they're not stupid, either. They did exactly what I would have done."

"Which is?"

"They identified the most powerful being on Earth. Then they identified the one person smart enough to defeat that being."

"You identified yourself, Lex. You offered to kill me for them, remember?"

"And now they're going to execute us both," Lex goes on as if he hasn't heard Clark. "Which is interesting, though of course you wouldn't notice. They won't just kill us. There was a trial. They named crimes, and I know they didn't lie about mine. I wish they had been a bit more specific about yours - that list sounded quite impressive."

Clark stops him by raising his hand. "Do you have a point? Then get to it."

"I was. They have a legal system, and they adhere to it. It's important to them. I've noticed this trend among magic users before - they're bound by laws, rules, what have you. And it follows that this is how we can defeat them."

"So... you're trying to become a wizard? In under eight hours?"

Lex sighs. "Wasn't there an interview where you claimed to have super-intelligence? This computer terminal gives me access to their legal texts. I'm trying to become a defence lawyer."

Oh, Clark thinks.

3.

"I had to force myself not to scream, every time he undressed. It's the biggest regret of my life, sharing my bed with a mutant for money and fame," Lois reads out loud, and snickers again.

Very calmly, Clark takes the rag that calls itself the Inquisitor, and crushes it in his fist. It takes a lot of self-control not to incinerate it. "You should be ashamed of yourself for even reading this trash," he tells Lois.

Lois sputters angrily. "Ashamed? I used to write for them! God, sometimes your self-righteousness is fucking annoying, Smallville."

He leaves before he can say anything he'll regret. It's late anyway, and dark outside. The right time for skulking on rooftoops, pretending to be Batman and spying on his mortal enemy. Lex's wives and divorces have been an almost soothing ritual. The only thing that still startles Clark, now and then, is how Lex can still be betrayed. How he lets himself be betrayed. Shouldn't someone capable of doing such horrible things as Lex be prepared for anything? But this time it's almost understandable. After all the murder plots and superpowered black widows, Cindy's confessional to the Inquisitor was an incredibly mundane kind of viciousness. "Behind the scenes: my marriage to a monster." When he first saw the headline, Clark silently applauded Cindy's bravery. Finally, someone who dared to expose Lex. But then Lois started reading, and he realised what kind of monstrousness Cindy meant.

Behind the scenes of my divorce from a shallow bitch. Clark watches through the large windows of the penthouse as Lex drinks. So familiar, the motions, the amber liquid, the tilt of his head, the fire shine.

"His head is like that of a grotesquely large baby. I couldn't bring myself to touch it. And the worst thing is, he never hides it. Someone with at least a little consideration would wear a wig, or a hat."

Not even in winter, Clark thinks, not even when it rains outside. He used to shake his head fondly at Lex's stubborn pride that forbade him to hide his bald head. And he used to admire how good Lex made it look. If Clark wore his freakishness on the outside, he's sure it wouldn't look so good. Lex has a nice neck, all graceful, yet deceptively strong if you see his shoulders. And his head has a nice shape. How can someone's head have a nice shape? How can the golden light of a fire look attractive on a bald head? Cindy couldn't bring herself to touch it, but Clark had a hard time resisting the impulse to reach out and touch. A few times he got to, by accident, or when Lex was hurt. Lex's skin simply felt smooth and warm and soft.

"You don't see it when you look at photographs of him, because he can afford the right fashion and stylists, but without all the money, Lex Luthor would make children scream if they saw him in the street."

Right now, Lex is wearing a silk bathrobe. It doesn't hide much, Clark realises with a blush. It's so short it doesn't cover even half of his thighs, and the belt is in danger of slipping off. Falling open nearly all the way down, the flimsy robe reveals the smooth, firm planes of Lex's body. No hair anywhere, pale but honey-coloured in the fire light. And not a single scar shows, except the tiny on Lex's upper lip. Lex reaches up with the hand that doesn't hold his glass and touches his collarbones. Clark is hypnotised. Was Cindy blind, did she not see any of this? Lex's hand travels down his chest, rubs his torso. It distracts Clark so much that he hardly notices the smear of blood trailing Lex's hand. When he sees it, he starts forward, saviour instinct kicking in, but the injury isn't life-threatening.

Clark's eyes follow the drops of blood on the marble floor to the bathroom, and the broken mirror there. But then they dart back to Lex and widen at what they see. Lex, laughing darkly to himself, wraps his bleeding hand around his cock. Pulls, and circles the head with his thumb, smearing blood over it instead of come.

"I brushed my teeth for hours after exchanging any kind of fluid with him. He doesn't taste human - like something rotten."

It isn't true. Lex tastes like river water and fear and fragile human life and hope. Now he probably tastes like blood and scotch and despair, and if his blood is poison to Clark, then only because Clark himself is not human, and his arrival poisoned Lex. But it didn't turn him into a monster. It didn't cripple him, no matter what Cindy says and what Clark fears Lex thinks.
He looks like pornography, intersecting art. Crouching in the dark, on a barren rooftop, Clark touches himself and breathes hard to the rhythm of Lex's strokes. Lex's cock is slick and hard in his pumping hand. Clark imagines how it would feel in his hand. How it would feel sliding over his lips and into his mouth. Lex would fuck his mouth, so angry, so hungry. A taste of pre-come on Clark's tongue, and then hot spurts of it, filling his mouth. Lex would force him to swallow. Lex would breathe, sharp, hard gasps like he does now, and make Clark lick him clean.

Clark, on his rooftop, realises that he has made a slick mess of his underwear. He bites his lip, ashamed. Lex, in his room, has gone slack in his own hand without release. He's leaning back in his armchair, eyes closed, his face a brittle mask. Clark knows without doubt that Lex thinks he is ugly right now. He wishes that he could cross the chasm between the houses and kneel before Lex's chair and just do what he wants. But all he does is fly home and take a shower.

A few months later, during one of their confrontations, Lex loses control for a moment, and calls Superman a monster, an abomination, a horrible, disgusting creature. "Why can't anybody but me see it?" Lex yells in hoarse frustration.

Clark lets him rage.

4.

"Lex. We need to talk."

Every time Superman tries to command Lex, it fails. Lex wipes his face with a towel, and casually displays his rippling shoulders, his sweat-stained shirt, the sliver of skin bared at his lean hips, his bare legs, long and smooth as a model's. He's taken up fighting again - boxing, knifes, martial arts, if it's violent, Lex will learn it - and Superman has interupted practice. The other man in the ring, also in shorts and T-shirt, is lying gasping and shivering on the floor. No internal injuries, merely defeated. "I'm a private citizen," Lex says smoothly, not a bit out of breath. "I have no obligations to you, Superman."

"You have obligations to your city," Clark replies sternly. "To your country, citizen Luthor."

Lex smiles, slow and sharp. Looks Superman up and down, sizes him up as if there's any inch of Clark's spandex-clad body that he doesn't know by heart. Clark wishes he could draw the cape around himself, because Lex's looks are touches. Lex's looks are sizing up his price. Then don't leave any part of him alone, and it feels as if Lex's hands (hands that can make a man bleed, and glide over the piano like dancers) roam freely, flat on his side, raking over his hipbone, finger-tips over his groin, a long, lingering trail down his inner thigh.

"Fight me," Lex says, and for a moment, Clark thinks he said 'fuck me'. But no, he means on the mats, in the ring. "And we might talk."

"Luthor," Clark says, trying to douse Lex's overconfidence.

"No powers." A razor-edge show of white teeth. "Pretend to be human for me."

For me. How many times has Clark asked, demanded, 'for me, Lex?' Shaking his head, he helps the defeated trainer out of the ring and hangs up his cape. "Am I supposed to win or lose?"

"Do your best," Lex replies, and gives him a short, ironic bow. Unnerved, Clark watches him circle, dodge, play. Light-footed, but there's nothing light in his feral grin. Their first contact goes terribly wrong: Lex attempts some kind of tricky judo throw, and Clark stands frozen as an unmovable object, and too late, too startled, reacts. Somehow, Lex ends up on the mats, bleeding from his lower lip. Clark flinches backwards. "I'm sorry," escapes him, and for a moment, he is certain that Lex must recognise him.

But Lex merely grins wider. "You're cheating," he says under his breath. "Always cheating."

The next time, Clark attacks first, using as little strength as he would on a football field, in the hope that with him in control, this can't go badly wrong. He tackles Lex and throws him to the ground, pinning him down. Blood on his lips, murder in his eyes, Lex lies under him and pants. His wrists are thin in Clark's large hands. Lex wriggles, quick like a fish on a hook, and tries to wrap his legs around Clark's waist to throw him off balance. Instead, they both freeze when Clark's hard-on comes into sudden contact with Lex's groin.

"So that's what you'd like to do to me," Lex says after a moment. He looks completely mad just then, his face drenched in sweat, and raises his head as far as he can to whisper into Clark's ear, "I might let you. If you cut loose. No pretending." Lips brush, bloody lips, breath moistens Clark's ear. "Like this. Holding me down. Hurting me."

Clark hardly even notices the small pointy stab between his ribs, but he hears the knife's blade break. Coldly, Lex says, "You're dead. If this were a real fight, my knife would be kryptonite."

5.

When Clark was fifteen, sixteen, and attraction to anyone was just a huge muddled mess, thinking that Lex was hot was wrong because Lex was a guy. A bit later, though not yet Later with a capital L, he thought it was wrong because Lex was Lex and therefore not safe in any way. Now, Clark is pretty sure that thinking Lex is hot is wrong because Lex is evil. Is doing evil, and Clark is not sure if there's a difference between doing and being. There's a difference between being attracted to Lex and doing something about it, that he knows. And he keeps that difference, that fine line, close to his heart. It matters not so much, he hopes, what he is, when he doesn't act on it.

Except for all the times that didn't help. He could never stop being an alien by not using his powers. He could never stop having these powers by denying them. He could never stop being Clark Kent by becoming Superman, and he could never stop being Kal-El by loving his human parents.

What he is, though, is someone who can't help staring, his heart jumping more lightly, more freely than it should, when Lex does evil. Lex's own racing heart-beat is the manic, hypnotising drum-beat soundtrack to the spectacle Clark watches. Lie after lie jumps from Lex's lips, plunges into free fall, and surely this time it must fall all the way, but just when he's sure no one could possibly believe it, it soars up and takes flight.

Another disaster, Metropolis is burning, crumbling, shuddering with the aftershocks of earthquakes, help is cut-off, no one is in charge. All the people who could be in charge circle each other like wolves, hunger and fear in their eyes. Lex is like that, by the power of ten, more hunger in one person than the world can feed. And he takes charge without so much as a dollar or an armed man under his command. All he has is a suit. They must think the suit was tailored for him, but Clark has seen him in tailored clothing, has memorised their fall and cut in his traitourously accurate memory, and this is a pale imitation. This suit was stolen or borrowed. To Lex, it probably feels like rags. But he doesn't let it show. The rags are his crown, his sceptre right now.

"Weren't you in prison?" someone asks, and earns a mild glance from Lex. Prison and presidency, towers of luxury and pits of madness, Lex has seen been through it. He's been rich and penniless, powerful and humiliated, hoplessly in love and in hate, afraid and confused. And yet, the fire was a forge and not a pyre. The core remains.

"Do I look like I was in prison?" Do I look like someone could put me into prison? Men laugh, and Lex has altered history.

Lex commands men with promises he can't keep, threats he can't make true, funds he doesn't have, allies he never knew. Lie piles upon lie and somehow becomes true. Being: Lex is a slight man who after his recent misfortunes has grown thin and sharp. A pale sickly child once and forever. Bald, and somehow that hairless head translates into nakedness. Stripped of his family, his fortune, his fame. Doing: Lex wants. Lex believes. Lex turns lies into truth, lead into gold, rags into riches, defeats into lessons, lessons into victory. Lex saves the city to save his own skin.

It will, like all things Lex touches, crumble into dust. The cardhouse will collapse, the lies will drop like domino stones. Icy rocks from outer space light up in the upper atmosphere right before they crash and burn. Clark has no right to think meteors beautiful, because they all are of his creation.

But he melts from the shadows anyways, and stops watching. Lex is coordinating disaster relief efforts that didn't even exist before he showed up. His eyes light up when he sees Superman, but he doesn't say a thing. Tension hangs between them. The other men would follow Superman, if Superman tried to take charge.

It feels as if Clark should be on his knees when he finally speaks. Swearing allegiance to a shooting star king.

"What do you want me to do, Lex?"