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III. How Soft This Prison Is
Of Fate if this is All
Has he no added Realm
A Dungeon but a Kinsman is
Incarceration -- Home.
He’d been sitting in the same position for hours, and even Kryptonian flesh was not immune to the occasional cramp. Minor stretching was possible, but he wanted to be right there when Lex woke up.
Not to mention that he wanted to get in some peaceful Lex-watching, a privilege he’d been denied lo these many years.
As the AI had predicted, the sedative wore off about eight hours after dosing, and Lex’s eyes fluttered rapidly as he returned to consciousness and sat straight up, barely noticing the sheet sliding off his lap. He didn’t speak, but his head whipped around until he found Clark.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said, and only Clark’s encyclopedic knowledge of Lex let him detect the tremor at the bottom of the words.
“We’ve never met like this before,” Clark replied as Lex swung his legs over the side of the bed, casually arranging the sheet as if it were a bespoke suit he’d just donned.
“How long have I been here?”
“Just a night. I had to knock you out for the surgery, but don’t worry, I used drugs, so there’s no new concussion.”
Lex’s scowl suggested that concussion wasn’t even at the bottom of the long list of things about which he worried.
“As you suggested a few years ago, there’s an implant to track your presence. There are also two shaped charges designed to go off if you get more than 400 meters from the Fortress without my direct authorization.”
“Two?” Lex asked, as if checking on the weather.
“One for each knee.” Lex would risk death – hell, Lex would court, seduce and cheat on death – but he was unlikely to risk life as a cripple. When Lex swallowed and looked away from Clark’s face, Clark knew that he’d come to the same conclusion.
“There is a lab. With Internet access, though it all goes through the AI first. It’s pretty good at detecting coded messages, just so you know.” The AI would also stop Lex from making anything with which he could kill himself – not by barring him from potentially deadly chemicals, because it was hard to find a nondangerous substance even if your scientist wasn’t a criminal mastermind. Back in Smallville, Lex had once shown him how to blow up a building with a bag of flour. The AI would manipulate the chemicals for Lex, never allowing him to touch them or even be in the same room. Clark figured that Lex didn’t need to hear the details from him.
“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” Lex said at last, still looking over Clark’s shoulder. “Did Hope and Mercy survive the crash?”
“Yeah.” Mercy would need physical therapy, for sure, but he’d been able to grab Hope from beside Lex and take her out before the car hit the edge of the road. He ought to send Mercy flowers.
“Do you always wear the uniform when you’re in the Fortress, or just when you have company?”
He could have been conducting a job interview for all the color in his voice. Actually, in a job interview, he was more likely to be intense, low and gravelly-voiced so that the interviewee would lean forward to be closer, to hear more. This Lex had all the passion of Peter Jennings.
Clark shook his head. “I can change if you want.”
“Can you.” Lex stared at him, his eyes Confederate gray in the Fortress’s harsh white light. “No, don’t bother. Let’s just fuck.”
He jerked away, his hands twisting on his knees. “What?”
“That *is* why I’m here, correct?”
“You’re an internationally wanted criminal,” Clark said as patiently as he could.
“And yet somehow this isn’t The Hague, or any other court of which I’m aware. I’m also sure you could have found an out-of-the way asteroid on which to strand me, which implies that your reasons for bringing me here are more personal than public-safety-oriented.”
Okay, this was silly. Lex didn’t have the moral high ground. Lex didn’t even have the moral bog; he’d gone beneath that years ago. “You were the one who always said the personal is political.”
“I’m not quite sure this is what the feminist movement had in mind. To return to the point,” he said, flipping off the sheet and splaying his legs, “you obviously brought me here to play house, and since my domestic skills are pretty much limited to the bedroom ….”
Clark blushed and turned away. “I’ll show you to your room.” He really needed some time to ramp back up to dealing with Lex. Nobody else was half as confusing.
Lex, of course, didn’t take the sheet, just followed Clark out of the little medical room and down the glossy white halls to the room he’d had the AI create, right next to Clark’s. There was a huge bed to accommodate Lex’s thrashing, a closet full of plain but well-made shirts and pants, and a computer terminal slaved to the AI. The bookshelves were almost empty, though he fully expected Lex to fill them over time.
Muscles shifting under pale skin, Lex sauntered over to the one occupied shelf. “Poetry, Clark?”
“It’s helped me understand some things,” he said, knowing he’d never be able to explain coherently how the words could slide over him like soothing ice, reordering the chaos of his tragedy-numbed brain.
“’Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’”
“The real problem is justifying man’s ways to God, you know.”
Lex turned to face him fully, and Clark resolutely kept his eyes up. “Is that a bit of disillusionment I hear from America’s favorite Eagle Scout?”
Typical. Lex wanted to prod and poke and annoy, because that distracted him from the long-term implications of his situation. Clark could wait him out. “Your self-image is just way too bound up in playing Satan to my Jehovah, Lex.”
“Nonsense, you’re the fallen angel.” But Lex looked away, running his fingers over the spines of the books.”
“I’ve got to go out,” Clark said after a minute of watching Lex hold himself still, as if he feared he might explode like nitroglycerin if he moved. “Why don’t you try to get settled in?”
“Yes, I’ve got so much baggage to unpack.”
Practically a wagon train, Clark thought, but closed his mouth over the words.
“Later, Lex,” he said and left the room.
When he returned from patrolling, after a long day highlighted by a volcano, a flood in Bangladesh, an oil spill off the coast of Portugal, and a bomb in the House of Lords, there was a message from Bruce with an attached video clip. He pulled it up, and watched CNN footage of Lex’s stronghold. “Sources confirm that Lex Luthor has been kidnapped by members of the Justice League, acting without sanction from the United Nations,” the bland announcer narrated. “The pro tem president of the Federated Bloc has filed a formal protest, and has threatened retaliation against the United States, where the Justice League is based.”
Call me, Bruce’s message said.
Clark hung his head and went to find Lex, who was sitting at his terminal, playing with what looked like a model of a strand of mRNA. Mercifully, he’d gotten dressed.
Lex looked up and grinned. “Busy day, honey?”
“How did you do it, Lex?”
“The Evil Overlord is only supposed to reveal the secrets of his success when he thinks he’s about to win, Clark. As your prisoner, I just don’t feel comfortable –“
He stopped as Clark dragged him from the chair and pushed him up against the wall, holding him far enough up that Lex was on his tiptoes.
“You know, domestic abuse is a crime.”
Clark’s fingers tightened involuntarily and Lex gasped, flushing pink. The hell of it was that Lex was right. But it was too late; he was already shaped around Lex’s damage. “It’s a good thing you’re a criminal.”
Proximity made his anger diffuse and unfocused. He kissed Lex, using teeth, scraping from Lex’s jaw to the tendons of his neck.
Lex shuddered and ripped at his own shirt, loosing and losing buttons in his haste. “Take off that circus outfit,” he ordered, and when Clark pulled back to comply, he leaned back against the wall and watched as if he’d just paid for a striptease.
Clark eyed his pants significantly, and Lex smirked and dropped them. He didn’t get a chance to step out of them, though, because Clark was on his knees, burying his nose in the crease between Lex’s thigh and groin, rubbing his cheek against Lex’s hardening length. When Lex growled, Clark moved and began to suck his cock.
“I set up a website years ago,” Lex gasped, rocking his hips until Clark’s hands stilled them. “Just type in the right IP address and subfile, and the appropriate message gets sent.”
He pulled back, letting Lex’s cock bob in the open air. “I guess I’m going to have to limit your access.”
Lex’s human hand fisted in his hair, urging him back. “You think that’ll work? You think I can’t do what I want even if you limit me to fucking AOL?”
In lieu of a reply, Clark bent his head to take Lex back inside, rubbing his fingers across the new bruises he’d made.
“I’ve been thinking about this for years,” Lex continued, and Clark wondered if even Lex knew the referent. “I can outthink your precious AI every day and twice on Sundays.”
Annoyed, Clark pulled away again. “Funny how you say that from your prison in the Fortress.”
“Funny how *you’re* sucking *my* dick.”
That could be remedied. He stood and dragged Lex over to the bed, pushing him over on his back and superspeeding for the lube.
“The AI gets to watch this, too, to further its knowledge of human-alien interactions?”
Clark didn’t dignify that with a reply, just slicked his fingers and rammed into Lex, whose hiss went from his ears straight to his cock. Pressing Lex’s legs up into his chest, Clark jerked his wet hand around his erection a few times and then thrust home.
He couldn’t tell who was groaning louder.
“All I have to do,” he panted, staring into Lex’s eyes, “is keep you here long enough for the power struggles to start. If I let you go a year from now, too many people will have reasons to want you to stay gone.”
The look on Lex’s face told him he’d scored a palpable hit. Clark wrenched Lex’s wrists over his head, stretching enough to make him arch into Clark’s touch. There was blood on Lex’s mouth where he’d bitten deep into his own lip.
“All I have to do,” Lex gritted out, grinding against him, “is become a martyr. You know as well as I do that I’ll be a legend. How’s it going to feel, wearing the black hat for a change?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, feeling the tingling at the base of his spine that presaged orgasm. “But I guess I’m going to rely on your advice.” He released Lex’s wrists to hold his face, forcing Lex to look at him. Something in his expression managed to surprise Lex, who opened his mouth but couldn’t say anything before the orgasm knocked Clark over like a two-by-four made of Kryptonite.
After a hazy eternity, he rolled off of Lex. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” Lex grumbled, turning to press his still-prominent erection against Clark’s side.
“Not enough,” he murmured, but scooted down to finish what he’d started. The taste, the smell, the poreless glory of Lex’s porcelain skin, it was everything he’d craved for years. Above him, Lex was whimpering, his nails finding no purchase on Clark’s shoulders, his breath harsh and pure.
He could do this, he thought as Lex filled his mouth with bitterness and salt.
He pretty much had to. The League wanted Lex dead, and that was not acceptable. Lex was adaptable, and could be kept busy. He’d return to the science that should have been his first love, and almost was even with Lionel’s cruel pruning and training. Thanks to the Kryptonite, he’d live a long time, maybe as long as Clark himself. And he’d be there every night when Clark returned, his attention no longer divided between Clark and his schemes.
It was going to be perfect. Lex would see reason.
It’s not as if he’d have a choice.
End
Fiat justitia, ruat caelum: let justice be done, though the heavens fall. Title credits: Wilde, Housman, Dickinson. I’m pretty proud that I got three prison poems out of three inverts (yes, I know Dickinson’s controversial, but allow me the stretch, all right?).
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From: (Anonymous)
That's more like it!
1. What ring Clark gave him? It's a bit startling because nothing else gives the impression that their pre-Rift relationship was ring-worthy. When Clark comes home to the Fortress at the end, Lex should be wearing a ring. He's mean that way.*eg*
2. This sentence has always caused me slight confusion: "If he could have, he would have asked his mother, but neither of them were available, and it did him no good whatsoever to make himself lonely and miserable in the middle of fighting with Lex." Who are "them"? His parents, or him and his mother?
Generally, yummmm. Makes a good, solid, somewhat bitter entree with all the schmoopy cookies going around.
Mary Ellen
Doctor Science
From:
Re: That's more like it!
1. I started from the premise that Lex & Clark were together for a while before Lex went bad. The ring's a symbol of that, and my thought was that Lex would convert it to Kryptonite-bearing, because he's mean like that. As for its absence in Act III, he might have had the Kryptonite taken out after he lost his hand, and he might (and when I say might, I mean did) keep the ring as one of his most sacred possessions, but I don't think he carried it around, so it wouldn't have been with him when Clark grabbed him.
Perhaps I shall attempt a clarification when I post to the various archives.
2. I meant Martha and Lara (that's her canon name, right?), but I take your point and will edit the sentence to make it less obfuscatory.
From: (Anonymous)
Re: That's more like it!
Only in my broadest and most inclusive definition of "happy ending".*g* But face it, not even in X-Files were characters so tragically doomed, doomed, *doomed*.
Re: the ring. No, I didn't mean that Lex would be wearing the original ring (which I had grasped was going to end up with a K-stone), but that Clark would come "home" and find Lex wearing a band he got the AI to cook up, to complete the bitter mockery of a marriage.
I meant Martha and Lara (that's her canon name, right?)
huh? Lara who? wow, am I confused.
Mary Ellen
From:
Re: That's more like it!
Lara is Clark/Kal-el's dead mom. I don't know if we can speak of her as pancaked like Lana's mom.
From:
*pets*
I loved how Lex was able to bypass the computer and inform the public about his kidnapping. I do wonder though how Clark will react if Lex really does try to leave the fortress, because I see Lex battling his imprisonment, reaching for freedom any way he can.
From:
Re: *pets*
From:
And...
http://www.hitman2.com/content/downloads/1024x768/Hitman2_wp2_1024-768.jpg
It is from the Hitman game, he plays an assassin, I believe. If you go to the main site:
http://www.hitman2.com/
and look at downloads it has pics and action sequence, there is also a bit of history.
From:
Re: And...