![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Part 2
Doomsday reappeared on a Tuesday, popping up out of an excavation site in Turkey and slaughtering an entire team of archaeologists, along with most of the other people in a two-mile radius.
The early reports were understandably confused, and at first the League sent only some minor hangers-on to investigate. Then, once they'd lost contact with those three, Hawk and Dove decided that this went beyond something the heroes on monitor duty ought to be dealing with alone, and called up J'onn.
By the time Clark got the call from Batman, ten hours had passed since the initial call for help from Turkey. Clark was naked in Lex's bed, which made talking to Batman uncomfortable; he always had the feeling Bruce could see him, and honestly it was probably true, what with Bruce's access to tech.
"I have to go," he said to Lex, who was just coming out of the bathroom. Lex didn't mind being nude—and Lex was nude, not naked; Clark was fairly confident that nakedness was declasse and therefore nonLuthorian. Clark cut his eyes away and tried to concentrate on Doomsday. Batman had given him all the intel available by satellite, but some things could only be discovered by showing up and punching. "It's Doomsday, he's out and he's heading towards Ankara."
"No," Lex said immediately.
"What?" Clark blinked at him.
"Apparently you need to be reminded of the last time you fought, when—stop me if this sounds familiar—he killed you. Even Christ only came back from the dead once. No, you are not going to fight Doomsday." Lex's hands were fisted at his sides; traces of damp still clung to his skin from the shower, and Clark wanted to nibble on him, keep the flush from fading.
"Um, yes, I am," he said instead, because he was used to postponing what he wanted for the greater good.
"Clark," Lex said carefully, his left hand moving to twist the bracelet of Rao around his right wrist, "I forbid you to fight Doomsday."
"Lex!" Wait, Lex knew about the power he had over Clark? But he hadn't been—Clark couldn't deal with this revelation right now. "Lex, it's Doomsday. Billions of people could die."
Lex tilted his head and stared at Clark unblinkingly. "I've got contingency plans, Batman has contingency plans. If we pool our resources—"
"Your contingency plans don't happen to involve really big bombs, do they?"
Lex clenched his jaw. "The longer you fight me on this, the more time Doomsday has to gain strength."
"No!" Clark yelled, and tried to turn away so he could superspeed into costume and out into the night. But the bracelet of Rao gave a slight squeeze, almost undetectable, and he was stuck in place, like he'd been trapped in one of Jor-El's beams of light. He couldn't even shift his feet, watching helplessly while Lex strode over to the bedside phone and started punching buttons.
"Lex," he said, loud enough to interfere with Lex's hurried instructions to Mercy. "Lex, this isn't your choice to make."
Lex dropped the receiver to his chest. "I believe it's clear that it is," he said, and almost succeeded in sounding casual. "If you go and get yourself killed, you're leaving us vulnerable to the next bad thing that crawls out of this rather extraordinarily hostile universe that's opened up in the past few decades since your arrival. I'd rather sacrifice a few hundred thousand people than lose the whole planet." He raised the phone and gave Mercy a few more code words.
Clark felt a stab of fury, red and hot. "If you stop me," Clark said, almost whispering now, "I'll never forgive you."
Lex's face was pale stone. "That's nothing new."
Clark couldn't figure it out. As for the risk, Clark had more PR value to Lex as a dead hero than a live one. Lex couldn't rationally think that holding Clark in reserve for a worse threat than Doomsday made any kind of sense.
Unless, maybe, the sex had tangled him up same as it had Clark. If this was some sort of misguided attempt to protect Clark, then Lex might not listen to reason, but he might still listen to Clark.
"Please." Clark found himself capable of dropping to his knees. "Please, Lex. I have to do this. It's—it's who I am. And I know you don't—I know you hate me. But if you ever—I saved you, Lex. I saved you and I never regretted it. And I never will. I just—I need you to let me do this. You can make me do anything, I know that. But let me—let me be Superman, and I'll. I'll do it all willingly. I'll be yours."
Lex's eyes were as wide as they'd been when he'd seen Clark stand in the way of a speeding car. He was shaking, like one of his expensive cars poised to zoom off. The phone dangled uselessly from his hand.
Clark bent his head, submissive, looking up at Lex through the fringe of his bangs. Lex swallowed, suddenly looking ten years older.
"You'd do that," he said. "Anything I wanted." His voice—Clark wanted to say it was wonderment, or a thrill of victory, but it sounded more like revulsion, like Clark had finally revealed himself to be weak in some crucial way.
Clark nodded anyway. He didn't know what else to do.
Lex closed his eyes, still as a mausoleum. "Go," he said.
Clark felt the compulsion holding him in place disintegrate. "Thank you," he said, and paused just long enough to register Lex's flinch.
****
Lex looked away from the smear of blood he'd left on the marble wall and examined his rapidly swelling hand. If he just let it go, he'd be healed in half an hour, but at least four of the bones would need to be rebroken and reset.
He had work to do before he could have his doctors see him. "Mercy," he said, hitting the intercom, "change of plan. Are the satellites retargeted yet?"
No point in letting Clark go get himself killed if Lex didn't give Clark the chance to save the world all by himself again.
As he waited for more intel, he straightened his fingers, welcoming the distraction of the pain. Clark had promised him everything he ever wanted, with the crucial flaw that made the success rot in his mouth. His very own Clark-puppet. If he told Clark that he wanted to hear Clark apologize for all the lies, all the mistrust, Clark would probably even feel honor-bound to do it.
And even worse: now, when Clark was hurt, maybe killed, it was Lex's choice. His fault. Even if Clark made it through this battle, Lex would be the one sending him to the next one, and the next one, until Clark soared too far and fell to earth.
Lex remembered the funeral, the first time Doomsday killed Clark. The world had been monochrome, even though the sun had been shining and the flowers thick as tears. He'd thought then that he could get over Clark, the way he'd gotten over losing his hair and his mother (which was to say, never and not at all, but he functioned). But then Clark had returned from the dead and that was even worse, because it meant that Lex could never be certain that it was over.
The viewscreen on the side wall flared to life, showing the satellite feed. There was a lot of dust, and the resolution was only six inches, but glimpses of Superman's ridiculous outfit were discernable as he and Doomsday set about pounding the stuffing out of each other.
"The Justice League is on the line," Mercy said in his ear.
"What is it?" Lex snapped.
"We need those space mirrors you've been constructing in the guise of communications satellites." Batman's growl was ridiculous—Lex knew for a fact that Bruce Wayne's natural voice was a tenor—and if he'd been physically present Lex wouldn't have been able to avoid taking a swing.
"The plan," Lex demanded, because this was no time for posturing (and yes, he was aware of the irony, but Lex knew plenty of things about the tech that no one at the League would have, and if he didn't understand what the aim was then they might as well be fighting separately).
There was a pause, and then a different voice came on. "We wish to target Superman with a beam of solar energy, while simultaneously hitting Doomsday with an anenergic pulse that should prevent him from gaining power by fighting."
Lex didn't know whether Wonder Woman understood the technical underpinnings—"anenergic pulse" sounded suspiciously like it had something to do with reversing the polarity of the neutron flow—but he was relieved to find that an actual adult seemed to be present up there.
"What do you need me to do?" he asked.
****
Clark was grateful that Doomsday looked so—well, alien now. He was as subject to anthropomorphism as any human, and an enemy who looked like a cross between a bug and a junkpile was a lot easier to hit.
The first task was to get Doomsday to an unpopulated area, punch by punch, knocking Doomsday across an area the length of a football field each time. Whenever Doomsday hit back, Clark carefully twisted so that they'd keep going in the same direction. Getting whaled on still hurt, but at least it represented a variety of progress.
When his League communicator crackled to warn him that help was coming, he was digging himself out of a thirty-foot crater, and his ears were ringing, so he didn't get all the details. Clark managed to roll up the slope a few feet before Doomsday's punch could send him another dozen feet into the ground. But Doomsday grabbed Clark's cape and dragged him the rest of the way to the surface so he could whirl Clark around and around like a slingshot, except that on each circuit Clark smashed into the earth again. Clark briefly wished that his uniform wasn't quite so indestructible.
When the light hit, it was like being shoved into the sun. Clark could feel himself healing, the prickle-pain of it almost pleasure, blood drying up and cells reknitting in that bath of solar energy.
Doomsday roared and Clark pulled himself free, turning in the air and using his heat vision to blast Doomsday back another twenty yards. The light followed Clark, like this was a reality show and he had the spotlight. Which was all well and good, but Doomsday was just going to get stronger as he adapted to Clark's strengths again.
Then another beam touched down, arrowing out of the sky and encircling Doomsday. It was hard to perceive—even Clark's multispectrum vision had trouble identifying it; he could tell it was there, giving a bluish cast to Doomsday and the patch of ground around him. But he couldn't figure out what it was.
Doomsday howled frustration and lashed out, but the circle moved with him, so that he couldn't even reach the sides. Clark felt an unwilling sympathy with him, a victim of a world he'd never made, now with some alien technology seemingly taunting him as it enclosed him.
"Superman," Green Arrow's voice came as Doomsday whirled, angrier and angrier as each attempt to free himself failed.
"Whatever you're doing, it's working," Clark confirmed. "What are you doing?"
"I'm sure Luthor could explain it to you," Green Arrow said, somehow making it into an insinuation.
Clark narrowed his eyes. "Sure, if I want to be lectured about physics." But actually Clark could imagine listening, and even enjoying: Lex had stopped lecturing him years ago, when he'd stopped thinking that Clark wanted to be around him. And given what Clark had promised, lectures were better than most of the alternatives.
There was a more pressing matter at hand. "What now? You can't keep this up forever," he pointed out, because even if there weren't a mechanical risk—Clark had learned the hard way that containment fields generally stopped containing at the worst possible moment—the Turkish government was unlikely to be thrilled with a permanent Doomsday monument in the middle of the country.
Like that, glowing green force lines appeared around the column of whatever-it-was. Clark always had to suppress an instinctive cringe when Green Lantern's energy fields showed up. He was too used to that particular light coming from Kryptonite. The construct looked almost like one of those Russian tea-glass holders, the Lantern energy carefully surrounding the beam encasing Doomsday, tugging him upwards in a cradle of light. Doomsday was still raging, flailing against the invisible walls of his cage and bouncing back like he was in a padded room.
Clark watched until, a mile and a half above the Earth, Doomsday was sucked into the satellite generating the beam, which swallowed him up and then began accelerating out towards deep space. It wasn't a permanent solution—no such thing—but if they were very, very lucky Doomsday would be out of commission long enough for the human race to evolve some better defenses.
Clark closed his eyes and basked in his own solar energy beam, like a housecat in a shaft of sun, and right then—because of course Lex was involved, and efficiency dictated against waste of good energy—the power cut off, leaving him with only regular light. Usually that was enough, a kiss of life across his skin whenever he was outside, but now it felt like he'd been dumped from a hot tub into a cold shower.
He shouldn't have needed an announcement that the crisis was over. Now he had to deal with everything that Doomsday had left behind. First the humanitarian crisis, and then—
And then Lex.
As Clark worked on repairing what he could and rescuing the few survivors in Doomsday's path, he tried to anticipate what was going to happen next, now that Lex's power over him was out in the open. He'd promised not to fight Lex. He wasn't entirely confident it was a promise he could keep, especially since Lex would be sure to taunt him.
Except that Lex hadn't been taunting him, not of late. Clark frowned, trying to remember the last time they'd fought before Doomsday. Lex had been busy with the campaign, of course—there were enough dirty tricks in politics to divert him from most of his usual shenanigans. So there'd been less to fight about, and Lex had been pretty careful to keep his activities on the up-and-up, what with more reporters than Lane and Kent looking for reasons to discredit him.
Maybe what Lex had needed all along was the scrutiny of public office.
On the other hand, maybe Lex was going to start to use his control more now that it was explicit. Lex had a better imagination than most people, even if it was largely wasted on paranoia and weapons design; Clark shuddered to think what Lex might ask of him. If his orders got too bad, Clark knew, there was always Batman and his Kryptonite stash.
Today had shown that Lex was still reachable. Clark had never given up on him entirely, and his faith had been justified. He could work his way around his promise in order to encourage Lex to do the right thing. Maybe he could even use the bond between them to draw Lex closer to virtue. Lex hated owing any debts, and he might come to think that Clark had overpaid for his bargain.
****
Lex watched the reports pour in as the news channels scrambled to get footage. They didn't have any special information, but he needed to get on top of the spin. Someone was going to blame Superman for the destruction; someone always did.
He was reminded of that lawsuit, blaming him for Superman's actions. He'd thought it was preposterous, but he hadn't been making the right connections. If only the lawyers understood the ritual of Rao, he'd be paying damages that made the award for the Exxon Valdez look like a parking ticket. And then there'd be all the plaintiffs complaining that he hadn't sent Superman in their direction when he could easily have done so, could have toted up the costs and benefits until Clark's every flight was preplanned. It was an old complaint: Superman stopped this car crash, why not mine?
When he heard those whines, Lex was always reminded of how much he hated it when people who survived accidents said that God must have been looking out for them, or when a winning sports team thanked God, because of the necessary implication that God wasn't looking out for or supporting everybody else. True, Superman existed, and not being omnipotent he also had to make choices, so in some ways the comparison was flawed. But there was still an unwillingness to accept that random chance was a governing force in life, that rain fell on the unjust and the just alike, and Lex was never going to respect people who expected Superman to play God without the arbitrariness that came with the position.
And then came the Ritual of Rao, which had radically changed Clark's decisionmaking capacity. Clark wasn't even going to fight him any more, at least if Clark kept his word; and if he did renege, Lex could most likely order him to shut up about his petty qualms.
Lex had long understood that he was an irresistable force, and Clark was his immovable object. He'd taken it as a comfort: Clark was always going to be there to blink those big green eyes and tell him not to go any farther. Now, that was no longer true, and it was worse than having the entire sky fall on him, more terrifying because Lex wasn't just afraid of dying.
He knew what he had to do. He'd known for a long time, really, as soon as he'd realized that ordinary measures wouldn't suffice.
He looked down at the bracelet. Still featureless black, indifferent to his attention. Alien as Clark, and ultimately as damaging.
He paced back to his desk and hit the button to talk to his secretary. "Patience," he said, "clear out the second sublevel. I want it empty by the time I get down there."
****
Because crises didn't wait for one another to finish before starting their own shenanigans, there was a forest fire in Indonesia. Clark spent five hours fighting it, then had to leave when the army asked him to get out. It was a familiar annoyance: governments wanting him around for the heavy lifting, but not for the finish so they could claim the credit for themselves. Clark didn't like it, but he still got to save lives, and that had to be enough.
Anyway, he didn't have to return to Metropolis (Lex) as long as there was work to be done. He zipped to the Watchtower and checked the monitors, but Superman-level events were relatively rare and bitter experience had shown that addressing non-Superman-level events outside of Metropolis was a recipe for disappointment, resentment, and other less pleasant emotions from the citizenry and, not incidentally, from his fellow heroes.
Some days it was hard to remember why it was so important to help humanity out.
He was sitting with Green Lantern, soaking up John's casual and silent companionship, when the bracelet of Rao twitched on his wrist.
Clark made a noise that had John jumping into a combat stance; Clark was on his feet himself, not knowing how he'd gotten there, when he felt the bracelet shrink fractionally. Cracks appeared all over its surface. Hesitantly, Clark poked at it with his left index finger.
It crumbled into dust, pouring across his wrist and into his palm as he twisted his hand, trying senselessly to catch the superfine particles that felt like silk, like air, as they puffed into a black-grey cloud and disappeared.
"Superman?" John asked.
He stared at his wrist, the skin there no paler than the rest of him, like it had never been covered up. There was a mole on the knob of his wrist, a little brown spot; a few specks of dust clung to the hairs around it.
His brain felt frozen; he could feel his expression changing, but he didn't know what—Lex couldn't be—Lex wouldn't just die, that was preposterous, like gravity disappearing and the moon going nova.
"Superman!" He heard John hit the intercom, talking fast to whoever was on duty, but the words were as stretched and blurry as if they were coming from the far side of the moon.
He had never been more grateful for the specially designed force field that let him exit the Watchtower at speed; he would have punched a hole in its side if he'd had to.
Lex wasn't supposed to be anywhere special right now, so Clark flew to Metropolis, arrowing his hearing to catch voices he recognized using Lex's name. Mercy was talking fast and vicious to someone, so he went to her. LuthorCorp didn't have a specially designed force field around the building. They were going to have to replace a couple of blast doors.
Mercy was paler than Clark had ever seen her, but composed. She was standing in front of a bank of monitors, watching dozens of scenes of frantic activity. He skidded to a halt beside her. "Where's Lex?"
She didn't twitch, just continued to snap orders into her headset about media and—surgeons?
Lex wasn't dead, then. Clark's internal organs lurched, and for the first time in years, decades maybe, he thought he was going to throw up. "Mercy," he said, catching her arm in his hand, "where's Lex?"
She sneered at him for nearly a second, but then his expression must have gotten to her, because she shook her head fractionally and said "I'll meet you in the OR," then disconnected.
"He's downstairs," she informed him, then twisted her hand snake-fast so that she was hanging on to him instead of the reverse. "Unless you know how to perform high-speed reconstructive surgery, your best bet is to stay out of the way."
"Reconstructive surgery?" Clark repeated. He could do a lot of things fast, but surgery had never been one of them.
She closed her eyes as if to gather strength, then glared at him with a purity of hate that he'd only seen in Doomsday's eyes before. "There was an accident," she said in a perfect PR voice. "Mr. Luthor's hand was severed at the wrist. The surgeons are attempting a reattachment. However, his advanced healing factor appears to be hampering the attempt."
An accident. Clark felt the phantom pressure of the cuff against his wrist and knew that the only accident was the one that had sent his ship slamming into a field right next to Lex.
He'd done this, by explicitly fighting Lex's control. It didn't matter that Lex had coerced him into the deal in the first place; Clark had known what he was doing, or he'd thought he had. A flush of anger filled him, even though it did little to counteract the guilt. Still, he was furious, shaking with it: Lex just had to discover an ethical code when it would do the maximum possible damage. Just had to make a suicidal gesture, probably because he couldn't cut off Clark's hand at the wrist and knew that doing it to himself would hurt more.
"I need to see him," he found himself saying, even though he was just as likely to punch Lex as anything else and even though he had no need whatsoever to ask Mercy's permission.
Mercy folded her arms. "The operating theater's not lead-lined." Which was pretty much a fuck-you, not that he should have expected anything different from her.
He scanned the building, and sure enough there was a full medical facility in the subbasement. He'd never bothered to look there. Three doctors were hunched over Lex's arm—the bones of the forearm were intact, but they just stopped where the wristbones should have joined them. An anaesthesiologist was checking Lex's vitals worriedly. "—not responding," she finished as Clark tuned in. Another side effect of Lex's meteor-enhanced healing, Clark realized: Lex was throwing off sedation and painkillers as fast as they could be pumped into him.
"We can't do it," the lead doctor said. "Mr. Luthor, I'm sorry, but the healing of the stump is too far advanced, and the hand—it seems to be suffering accelerated decomposition." Clark flicked his gaze over to the refrigerated unit at the side of the operating table. What he saw inside didn't look like it could have belonged to a living human. He'd seen a lot of death and destruction, bodies torn and burnt, but he still had to fight back the nausea.
Probably this, too, was meteor-related. Whatever unnatural vitality Lex possessed had been taken back, like his hand was Dorian Grey's picture.
Lex still hadn't said anything.
"Mr. Luthor?" the doctor prompted. The other two backed away, presumably wanting to get out of the line of fire.
Lex opened his eyes. His skin temperature was low, too low to be accounted for by the chill of the operating room. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his temples. His jaw worked. "Thank you, Dr. Houn," he said at last. "Please do what you need to do to close up, then schedule a consult about a prosthetic with my assistant."
Clark fell back against the wall, staring up at nothing.
"I need to reschedule three campaign appearances," Mercy said sharply, startling him. "You're not welcome here."
Clark meant to snap back at her, but he couldn't figure out a thing to say.
"I'm sorry, was I unclear?" Mercy asked, honey over cayenne. "Get out or you'll be picking Kryptonite out of every square inch of your superheroic hide."
Clark went.
****
Lex wouldn't have thought that his right hand was all that useful, and his healing factor had gotten him through the phantom itch more quickly than he'd had any right to hope. But it was shocking how intensely he missed his previous symmetry. As it turned out, the nondominant hand was still extremely useful, or at least its absence extremely frustrating when he tried to do simple tasks like dressing himself, or soaping up in the shower, or answering email.
It was a good thing he hadn't let himself think about his plan too much before enacting it, because even a minute's thought would have convinced him that it was the stupidest sacrifice since the Bay of Pigs.
He'd done a brief press appearance, shown off a temporary prosthesis under a black leather glove. All signs indicated that the 'accident' wasn't going to affect the election. It was just too weird for voters to process, and as long as he didn't show the stump in public he was unlikely to trigger a serious aversive response, or so his staff psychologists told him.
Funnily enough, he wasn't all that worried about the election any more.
Maybe he ought to be questioning his fitness for the post. After all, a president had to be prepared to send people to die. Done right, that would require at least as much bravery as walking into mortal danger oneself—and Lex had never wanted to do it wrong.
But a president got to order people who volunteered; a president got to order people who voted.
No, that was all window dressing: the fact of the matter was, Lex couldn't be the one who sent Clark to his death against his will and he couldn't be the one who kept Clark away from his glorious goddamned mission to save humanity against his will. He refused to be the man who used Clark as a hammer, an object to be deployed if and only if it suited Lex's desires. And it would come to that, even if Lex resisted the first time: look how well he'd done turning down Clark's physical attentions. Forced fucking only contaminated him; abusing Clark's other abilities ran the risk of destroying the world.
All Clark's other blame, that was just the price of living, the decisions Lex had made that had seemed right, or at least necessary, at the time. Lex's sins were investigative, protective, occasionally wrathful. He always had reasons, defenses, excuses for Clark.
Not this time.
Almost worse than losing the hand was that he'd surrendered every inch of contested ground in the battle with Clark. Clark would take Lex's gesture (no pun intended, he thought, and smiled) as confirmation that his simplistic view of the world was right and that Lex agreed, underneath it all. Lex might still win the election, but as between the two of them, he was worse off than he'd been before the Ritual of Rao.
"Lex?" Clark's voice from behind him was tentative, coddling. So it began.
He closed his eyes. He'd have to remember to reprogram the doors to the penthouse. "Do we have business?" He made himself swivel his chair to face Clark. The temporary prosthesis couldn't clench its fingers, which was a reminder that he should keep his left hand relaxed. "Or is it perhaps pleasure that brings you?"
Clark went pale, or as pale as a golden idol like Clark could get. "You let me go," he said.
"I take it as an unpleasant judgment on humanity that 'Superman' refers to brawn and not brains."
Clark, shockingly, looked hurt for a moment. "I mean—" When he stopped, drew breath, and smiled—just a little, a curve of the lips that promised nothing tolerable—Lex knew that he was in worse trouble than he'd imagined. "How many more body parts do you think you can sacrifice before you have to talk to me for real?"
Lex fought his body to stillness. "I had thought that the point of losing the hand was to avoid talking to you at all."
"That's not going to work," Clark said, as predictable as ever. "I've been trying to understand why, what would make you decide to give up the greatest weapon you've ever had." Lex didn't contest the description; Clark was speaking with accuracy, not self-love. "But then—tell me, Lex: why did you tell me not to go after Doomsday?"
Lex clenched his hand, hard. "Again: I'm not discussing this with you."
Clark sighed. "Fine. Then you're going to sit here and watch the interview I just gave to Lois."
He couldn't outrun Clark, and shooting him with the reserve Kryptonite gun would be an overreaction even for him, so he gritted his teeth and pulled up the Planet's website.
Clark was sitting on a too-small chair, squirming as he looked down at his lap, at his bare wrist.
"How are you doing?" Lane asked, almost softly, and Clark's head jerked up, his eyes widening in surprise. She started to roll her eyes and then rather obviously realized that the camera could pick that up, so she cleared her throat. "What can you tell us about the accident?"
Clark, never good at PR, ignored the camera and stared straight at Lane. "Thanks for your concern. Uh, I don't really know what happened. I was away on League business and—Lex hasn't been able to tell me much. From what I know, the explosion happened very fast and the accounts are still pretty confused."
Lex needed to revise his judgment on Clark's ability to deal with the press. Clark was, after all, a political reporter, and he'd had a great deal of experience with deflection. That answer was an elegant diversion, making it sound like Lex didn't remember much. He was trying to forget; holding his hand in place to be crushed by heavy machinery was just about the worst thing he'd ever made himself do—it made him nostalgic for eating grubs and talking to his imaginary friend Louis.
"Is the accident related to the fact that you're no longer wearing your bracelet?" Lane leaned forward a tad, as if she planned on jumping Clark and sticking her tongue down his throat if he announced that he had separated from Lex.
Clark pasted on an expression that bore about as much relation to a smile as a three-year-old's drawing of a person resembled a photograph. "Uh. It's kind of, a private thing. Culturally. Actually, I've been thinking. I'll always be Kryptonian. But I'm also an American, and—it's time Lex and I made it official the American way."
Lane's response to such an obviously juicy statement was practically Pavlovian; she was lucky she didn't need to wipe the drool off of her chin. "And what is the American way, in this case?"
Clark smiled, the real one this time, supernova-bright even through the Superman illusion that distorted his face. "I guess that depends on where we're living six months from now."
Lex stopped the replay. He was grateful that his limbs worked. A lesser man would have asked a stupid question like, 'Did you just propose to me on camera?'
He cleared his throat. "Why did you propose to me on camera?"
"Uh, because apparently we only talk to other people about the fact that we can't actually live without each other?"
Lex turned. His face was inches from Clark's. Clark had turned off his Superman face, but it was still the same smile. "I can live without you," Lex told him, except that it came out a tad too breathless for comfort.
"You can live without saying it out loud, I'll give you that. But, Lex, you kind of showed your hand—" Clark turned bright red and even Lex was struck speechless at the utter inappropriateness.
They stared at each other, frozen, until Lex couldn't contain his laughter. It hurt—especially when he tried to clutch at his stomach and only managed half the job—but it was pure Smallville-era Clark, awkward and with no sense of social grace, and somehow that was exactly what Lex needed to hear.
When he managed to stop wheezing, Lex saw that Clark had retreated a couple of feet, but he still had his determined Man of Steel expression.
"When I'm leader of the free world, I'm going to order you around and you're going to do what I ask," Lex warned.
Clark considered him, head tilted a little. Lex knew he wasn't being scanned with X-ray vision, because that wouldn't give Clark any further insights, but he still had to stop himself from squirming. "Probably," he said. "When you make a case for it."
Part of Lex, the part most powerfully formed by reaction to his father, wanted to be angry at the prospect of endless battles, always having to prove his bona fides. A smaller but active part thought it might be the most interesting challenge he could give himself.
"Would you like to hear a case made for the virtues of oral sex?"
Clark's blush, which had faded, returned in full force. Lex was oddly charmed. "I'm willing to take that one on faith," Clark said quickly. And then there was very little of consequence to say.
****
"So," Jon Stewart said, "Superman and Lex Luthor got rid of their promise bracelets, causing screams of outrage in the fashion world. What will they do with all their unsold inventory now?" There was a picture, which Lex profoundly hoped had been photoshopped, of crates of sluglike gray bracelets engraved with Superman's crest spilling out onto Canal Street.
"The real question on everyone's lips is, what were the bracelets for?" he continued. "Superman says it's a cultural thing; all I can say is, Kryptonians better not have worshipped Xenu, or Superman's going to confront the only force that could truly defeat him: Scientology." Pause; smirk. "Nah, that's just crazy talk. So, the bracelets' real function—I'm thinking bleep-bleep." Lex could lip-read 'cock ring.' The audience roared. "I'm just saying, that Superman outfit is designed to make really clear that 'Superman' isn't false advertising."
Strangely, Lex was starting to find seeing his life played out on a fake news show rather comforting. Given how many entirely preposterous things had happened to him, fake news seemed just about right.
"Of course, you know what this means." He shifted to falsetto and wriggled his hands: "Wedding of the century. Will they wait until Luthor's in the White House? Given those pictures from a couple months ago, the First Residence will be the only thing about them entitled to wear white. Ooh, and then: Superman, as first—well, first superhero, I guess; Superman gets to redecorate." The screen showed a picture of the White House merged with the Fortress of Solitude, the whole thing looking like a Freudian nightmare of ice phalluses. Lex rather liked it.
"Maybe that's too much; maybe he'll just pick out some new china." This time the picture showed Clark, smiling uncomfortably, photomanipulated so that he was holding one of the collectible plastic plates McDonald's had issued back when the League was just getting started, the one with Batman's sigil on it. "Or is that in bad taste, to have a constant reminder of your exes around?" Lex choked a little on his drink. "Come on, what do you think those guys do up in that tower, away from the rest of the world, while they're waiting for some crisis to resolve? Think about it: first thing you'd do with superpowers, you'd take 'em for a little spin underneath the sheets. Or floating above the sheets." He raised his eyebrows and grinned out at the audience, which was applauding.
Lex took another swallow and thought that Bruce was probably less happy with the monologue than he was. And really, he could live with that.
"Lex?" Clark called from the bedroom. "Turn off the computer and get in here."
Lex didn't have to obey.
He just felt like it.
END
comments on DW; comments on LJ
Doomsday reappeared on a Tuesday, popping up out of an excavation site in Turkey and slaughtering an entire team of archaeologists, along with most of the other people in a two-mile radius.
The early reports were understandably confused, and at first the League sent only some minor hangers-on to investigate. Then, once they'd lost contact with those three, Hawk and Dove decided that this went beyond something the heroes on monitor duty ought to be dealing with alone, and called up J'onn.
By the time Clark got the call from Batman, ten hours had passed since the initial call for help from Turkey. Clark was naked in Lex's bed, which made talking to Batman uncomfortable; he always had the feeling Bruce could see him, and honestly it was probably true, what with Bruce's access to tech.
"I have to go," he said to Lex, who was just coming out of the bathroom. Lex didn't mind being nude—and Lex was nude, not naked; Clark was fairly confident that nakedness was declasse and therefore nonLuthorian. Clark cut his eyes away and tried to concentrate on Doomsday. Batman had given him all the intel available by satellite, but some things could only be discovered by showing up and punching. "It's Doomsday, he's out and he's heading towards Ankara."
"No," Lex said immediately.
"What?" Clark blinked at him.
"Apparently you need to be reminded of the last time you fought, when—stop me if this sounds familiar—he killed you. Even Christ only came back from the dead once. No, you are not going to fight Doomsday." Lex's hands were fisted at his sides; traces of damp still clung to his skin from the shower, and Clark wanted to nibble on him, keep the flush from fading.
"Um, yes, I am," he said instead, because he was used to postponing what he wanted for the greater good.
"Clark," Lex said carefully, his left hand moving to twist the bracelet of Rao around his right wrist, "I forbid you to fight Doomsday."
"Lex!" Wait, Lex knew about the power he had over Clark? But he hadn't been—Clark couldn't deal with this revelation right now. "Lex, it's Doomsday. Billions of people could die."
Lex tilted his head and stared at Clark unblinkingly. "I've got contingency plans, Batman has contingency plans. If we pool our resources—"
"Your contingency plans don't happen to involve really big bombs, do they?"
Lex clenched his jaw. "The longer you fight me on this, the more time Doomsday has to gain strength."
"No!" Clark yelled, and tried to turn away so he could superspeed into costume and out into the night. But the bracelet of Rao gave a slight squeeze, almost undetectable, and he was stuck in place, like he'd been trapped in one of Jor-El's beams of light. He couldn't even shift his feet, watching helplessly while Lex strode over to the bedside phone and started punching buttons.
"Lex," he said, loud enough to interfere with Lex's hurried instructions to Mercy. "Lex, this isn't your choice to make."
Lex dropped the receiver to his chest. "I believe it's clear that it is," he said, and almost succeeded in sounding casual. "If you go and get yourself killed, you're leaving us vulnerable to the next bad thing that crawls out of this rather extraordinarily hostile universe that's opened up in the past few decades since your arrival. I'd rather sacrifice a few hundred thousand people than lose the whole planet." He raised the phone and gave Mercy a few more code words.
Clark felt a stab of fury, red and hot. "If you stop me," Clark said, almost whispering now, "I'll never forgive you."
Lex's face was pale stone. "That's nothing new."
Clark couldn't figure it out. As for the risk, Clark had more PR value to Lex as a dead hero than a live one. Lex couldn't rationally think that holding Clark in reserve for a worse threat than Doomsday made any kind of sense.
Unless, maybe, the sex had tangled him up same as it had Clark. If this was some sort of misguided attempt to protect Clark, then Lex might not listen to reason, but he might still listen to Clark.
"Please." Clark found himself capable of dropping to his knees. "Please, Lex. I have to do this. It's—it's who I am. And I know you don't—I know you hate me. But if you ever—I saved you, Lex. I saved you and I never regretted it. And I never will. I just—I need you to let me do this. You can make me do anything, I know that. But let me—let me be Superman, and I'll. I'll do it all willingly. I'll be yours."
Lex's eyes were as wide as they'd been when he'd seen Clark stand in the way of a speeding car. He was shaking, like one of his expensive cars poised to zoom off. The phone dangled uselessly from his hand.
Clark bent his head, submissive, looking up at Lex through the fringe of his bangs. Lex swallowed, suddenly looking ten years older.
"You'd do that," he said. "Anything I wanted." His voice—Clark wanted to say it was wonderment, or a thrill of victory, but it sounded more like revulsion, like Clark had finally revealed himself to be weak in some crucial way.
Clark nodded anyway. He didn't know what else to do.
Lex closed his eyes, still as a mausoleum. "Go," he said.
Clark felt the compulsion holding him in place disintegrate. "Thank you," he said, and paused just long enough to register Lex's flinch.
****
Lex looked away from the smear of blood he'd left on the marble wall and examined his rapidly swelling hand. If he just let it go, he'd be healed in half an hour, but at least four of the bones would need to be rebroken and reset.
He had work to do before he could have his doctors see him. "Mercy," he said, hitting the intercom, "change of plan. Are the satellites retargeted yet?"
No point in letting Clark go get himself killed if Lex didn't give Clark the chance to save the world all by himself again.
As he waited for more intel, he straightened his fingers, welcoming the distraction of the pain. Clark had promised him everything he ever wanted, with the crucial flaw that made the success rot in his mouth. His very own Clark-puppet. If he told Clark that he wanted to hear Clark apologize for all the lies, all the mistrust, Clark would probably even feel honor-bound to do it.
And even worse: now, when Clark was hurt, maybe killed, it was Lex's choice. His fault. Even if Clark made it through this battle, Lex would be the one sending him to the next one, and the next one, until Clark soared too far and fell to earth.
Lex remembered the funeral, the first time Doomsday killed Clark. The world had been monochrome, even though the sun had been shining and the flowers thick as tears. He'd thought then that he could get over Clark, the way he'd gotten over losing his hair and his mother (which was to say, never and not at all, but he functioned). But then Clark had returned from the dead and that was even worse, because it meant that Lex could never be certain that it was over.
The viewscreen on the side wall flared to life, showing the satellite feed. There was a lot of dust, and the resolution was only six inches, but glimpses of Superman's ridiculous outfit were discernable as he and Doomsday set about pounding the stuffing out of each other.
"The Justice League is on the line," Mercy said in his ear.
"What is it?" Lex snapped.
"We need those space mirrors you've been constructing in the guise of communications satellites." Batman's growl was ridiculous—Lex knew for a fact that Bruce Wayne's natural voice was a tenor—and if he'd been physically present Lex wouldn't have been able to avoid taking a swing.
"The plan," Lex demanded, because this was no time for posturing (and yes, he was aware of the irony, but Lex knew plenty of things about the tech that no one at the League would have, and if he didn't understand what the aim was then they might as well be fighting separately).
There was a pause, and then a different voice came on. "We wish to target Superman with a beam of solar energy, while simultaneously hitting Doomsday with an anenergic pulse that should prevent him from gaining power by fighting."
Lex didn't know whether Wonder Woman understood the technical underpinnings—"anenergic pulse" sounded suspiciously like it had something to do with reversing the polarity of the neutron flow—but he was relieved to find that an actual adult seemed to be present up there.
"What do you need me to do?" he asked.
****
Clark was grateful that Doomsday looked so—well, alien now. He was as subject to anthropomorphism as any human, and an enemy who looked like a cross between a bug and a junkpile was a lot easier to hit.
The first task was to get Doomsday to an unpopulated area, punch by punch, knocking Doomsday across an area the length of a football field each time. Whenever Doomsday hit back, Clark carefully twisted so that they'd keep going in the same direction. Getting whaled on still hurt, but at least it represented a variety of progress.
When his League communicator crackled to warn him that help was coming, he was digging himself out of a thirty-foot crater, and his ears were ringing, so he didn't get all the details. Clark managed to roll up the slope a few feet before Doomsday's punch could send him another dozen feet into the ground. But Doomsday grabbed Clark's cape and dragged him the rest of the way to the surface so he could whirl Clark around and around like a slingshot, except that on each circuit Clark smashed into the earth again. Clark briefly wished that his uniform wasn't quite so indestructible.
When the light hit, it was like being shoved into the sun. Clark could feel himself healing, the prickle-pain of it almost pleasure, blood drying up and cells reknitting in that bath of solar energy.
Doomsday roared and Clark pulled himself free, turning in the air and using his heat vision to blast Doomsday back another twenty yards. The light followed Clark, like this was a reality show and he had the spotlight. Which was all well and good, but Doomsday was just going to get stronger as he adapted to Clark's strengths again.
Then another beam touched down, arrowing out of the sky and encircling Doomsday. It was hard to perceive—even Clark's multispectrum vision had trouble identifying it; he could tell it was there, giving a bluish cast to Doomsday and the patch of ground around him. But he couldn't figure out what it was.
Doomsday howled frustration and lashed out, but the circle moved with him, so that he couldn't even reach the sides. Clark felt an unwilling sympathy with him, a victim of a world he'd never made, now with some alien technology seemingly taunting him as it enclosed him.
"Superman," Green Arrow's voice came as Doomsday whirled, angrier and angrier as each attempt to free himself failed.
"Whatever you're doing, it's working," Clark confirmed. "What are you doing?"
"I'm sure Luthor could explain it to you," Green Arrow said, somehow making it into an insinuation.
Clark narrowed his eyes. "Sure, if I want to be lectured about physics." But actually Clark could imagine listening, and even enjoying: Lex had stopped lecturing him years ago, when he'd stopped thinking that Clark wanted to be around him. And given what Clark had promised, lectures were better than most of the alternatives.
There was a more pressing matter at hand. "What now? You can't keep this up forever," he pointed out, because even if there weren't a mechanical risk—Clark had learned the hard way that containment fields generally stopped containing at the worst possible moment—the Turkish government was unlikely to be thrilled with a permanent Doomsday monument in the middle of the country.
Like that, glowing green force lines appeared around the column of whatever-it-was. Clark always had to suppress an instinctive cringe when Green Lantern's energy fields showed up. He was too used to that particular light coming from Kryptonite. The construct looked almost like one of those Russian tea-glass holders, the Lantern energy carefully surrounding the beam encasing Doomsday, tugging him upwards in a cradle of light. Doomsday was still raging, flailing against the invisible walls of his cage and bouncing back like he was in a padded room.
Clark watched until, a mile and a half above the Earth, Doomsday was sucked into the satellite generating the beam, which swallowed him up and then began accelerating out towards deep space. It wasn't a permanent solution—no such thing—but if they were very, very lucky Doomsday would be out of commission long enough for the human race to evolve some better defenses.
Clark closed his eyes and basked in his own solar energy beam, like a housecat in a shaft of sun, and right then—because of course Lex was involved, and efficiency dictated against waste of good energy—the power cut off, leaving him with only regular light. Usually that was enough, a kiss of life across his skin whenever he was outside, but now it felt like he'd been dumped from a hot tub into a cold shower.
He shouldn't have needed an announcement that the crisis was over. Now he had to deal with everything that Doomsday had left behind. First the humanitarian crisis, and then—
And then Lex.
As Clark worked on repairing what he could and rescuing the few survivors in Doomsday's path, he tried to anticipate what was going to happen next, now that Lex's power over him was out in the open. He'd promised not to fight Lex. He wasn't entirely confident it was a promise he could keep, especially since Lex would be sure to taunt him.
Except that Lex hadn't been taunting him, not of late. Clark frowned, trying to remember the last time they'd fought before Doomsday. Lex had been busy with the campaign, of course—there were enough dirty tricks in politics to divert him from most of his usual shenanigans. So there'd been less to fight about, and Lex had been pretty careful to keep his activities on the up-and-up, what with more reporters than Lane and Kent looking for reasons to discredit him.
Maybe what Lex had needed all along was the scrutiny of public office.
On the other hand, maybe Lex was going to start to use his control more now that it was explicit. Lex had a better imagination than most people, even if it was largely wasted on paranoia and weapons design; Clark shuddered to think what Lex might ask of him. If his orders got too bad, Clark knew, there was always Batman and his Kryptonite stash.
Today had shown that Lex was still reachable. Clark had never given up on him entirely, and his faith had been justified. He could work his way around his promise in order to encourage Lex to do the right thing. Maybe he could even use the bond between them to draw Lex closer to virtue. Lex hated owing any debts, and he might come to think that Clark had overpaid for his bargain.
****
Lex watched the reports pour in as the news channels scrambled to get footage. They didn't have any special information, but he needed to get on top of the spin. Someone was going to blame Superman for the destruction; someone always did.
He was reminded of that lawsuit, blaming him for Superman's actions. He'd thought it was preposterous, but he hadn't been making the right connections. If only the lawyers understood the ritual of Rao, he'd be paying damages that made the award for the Exxon Valdez look like a parking ticket. And then there'd be all the plaintiffs complaining that he hadn't sent Superman in their direction when he could easily have done so, could have toted up the costs and benefits until Clark's every flight was preplanned. It was an old complaint: Superman stopped this car crash, why not mine?
When he heard those whines, Lex was always reminded of how much he hated it when people who survived accidents said that God must have been looking out for them, or when a winning sports team thanked God, because of the necessary implication that God wasn't looking out for or supporting everybody else. True, Superman existed, and not being omnipotent he also had to make choices, so in some ways the comparison was flawed. But there was still an unwillingness to accept that random chance was a governing force in life, that rain fell on the unjust and the just alike, and Lex was never going to respect people who expected Superman to play God without the arbitrariness that came with the position.
And then came the Ritual of Rao, which had radically changed Clark's decisionmaking capacity. Clark wasn't even going to fight him any more, at least if Clark kept his word; and if he did renege, Lex could most likely order him to shut up about his petty qualms.
Lex had long understood that he was an irresistable force, and Clark was his immovable object. He'd taken it as a comfort: Clark was always going to be there to blink those big green eyes and tell him not to go any farther. Now, that was no longer true, and it was worse than having the entire sky fall on him, more terrifying because Lex wasn't just afraid of dying.
He knew what he had to do. He'd known for a long time, really, as soon as he'd realized that ordinary measures wouldn't suffice.
He looked down at the bracelet. Still featureless black, indifferent to his attention. Alien as Clark, and ultimately as damaging.
He paced back to his desk and hit the button to talk to his secretary. "Patience," he said, "clear out the second sublevel. I want it empty by the time I get down there."
****
Because crises didn't wait for one another to finish before starting their own shenanigans, there was a forest fire in Indonesia. Clark spent five hours fighting it, then had to leave when the army asked him to get out. It was a familiar annoyance: governments wanting him around for the heavy lifting, but not for the finish so they could claim the credit for themselves. Clark didn't like it, but he still got to save lives, and that had to be enough.
Anyway, he didn't have to return to Metropolis (Lex) as long as there was work to be done. He zipped to the Watchtower and checked the monitors, but Superman-level events were relatively rare and bitter experience had shown that addressing non-Superman-level events outside of Metropolis was a recipe for disappointment, resentment, and other less pleasant emotions from the citizenry and, not incidentally, from his fellow heroes.
Some days it was hard to remember why it was so important to help humanity out.
He was sitting with Green Lantern, soaking up John's casual and silent companionship, when the bracelet of Rao twitched on his wrist.
Clark made a noise that had John jumping into a combat stance; Clark was on his feet himself, not knowing how he'd gotten there, when he felt the bracelet shrink fractionally. Cracks appeared all over its surface. Hesitantly, Clark poked at it with his left index finger.
It crumbled into dust, pouring across his wrist and into his palm as he twisted his hand, trying senselessly to catch the superfine particles that felt like silk, like air, as they puffed into a black-grey cloud and disappeared.
"Superman?" John asked.
He stared at his wrist, the skin there no paler than the rest of him, like it had never been covered up. There was a mole on the knob of his wrist, a little brown spot; a few specks of dust clung to the hairs around it.
His brain felt frozen; he could feel his expression changing, but he didn't know what—Lex couldn't be—Lex wouldn't just die, that was preposterous, like gravity disappearing and the moon going nova.
"Superman!" He heard John hit the intercom, talking fast to whoever was on duty, but the words were as stretched and blurry as if they were coming from the far side of the moon.
He had never been more grateful for the specially designed force field that let him exit the Watchtower at speed; he would have punched a hole in its side if he'd had to.
Lex wasn't supposed to be anywhere special right now, so Clark flew to Metropolis, arrowing his hearing to catch voices he recognized using Lex's name. Mercy was talking fast and vicious to someone, so he went to her. LuthorCorp didn't have a specially designed force field around the building. They were going to have to replace a couple of blast doors.
Mercy was paler than Clark had ever seen her, but composed. She was standing in front of a bank of monitors, watching dozens of scenes of frantic activity. He skidded to a halt beside her. "Where's Lex?"
She didn't twitch, just continued to snap orders into her headset about media and—surgeons?
Lex wasn't dead, then. Clark's internal organs lurched, and for the first time in years, decades maybe, he thought he was going to throw up. "Mercy," he said, catching her arm in his hand, "where's Lex?"
She sneered at him for nearly a second, but then his expression must have gotten to her, because she shook her head fractionally and said "I'll meet you in the OR," then disconnected.
"He's downstairs," she informed him, then twisted her hand snake-fast so that she was hanging on to him instead of the reverse. "Unless you know how to perform high-speed reconstructive surgery, your best bet is to stay out of the way."
"Reconstructive surgery?" Clark repeated. He could do a lot of things fast, but surgery had never been one of them.
She closed her eyes as if to gather strength, then glared at him with a purity of hate that he'd only seen in Doomsday's eyes before. "There was an accident," she said in a perfect PR voice. "Mr. Luthor's hand was severed at the wrist. The surgeons are attempting a reattachment. However, his advanced healing factor appears to be hampering the attempt."
An accident. Clark felt the phantom pressure of the cuff against his wrist and knew that the only accident was the one that had sent his ship slamming into a field right next to Lex.
He'd done this, by explicitly fighting Lex's control. It didn't matter that Lex had coerced him into the deal in the first place; Clark had known what he was doing, or he'd thought he had. A flush of anger filled him, even though it did little to counteract the guilt. Still, he was furious, shaking with it: Lex just had to discover an ethical code when it would do the maximum possible damage. Just had to make a suicidal gesture, probably because he couldn't cut off Clark's hand at the wrist and knew that doing it to himself would hurt more.
"I need to see him," he found himself saying, even though he was just as likely to punch Lex as anything else and even though he had no need whatsoever to ask Mercy's permission.
Mercy folded her arms. "The operating theater's not lead-lined." Which was pretty much a fuck-you, not that he should have expected anything different from her.
He scanned the building, and sure enough there was a full medical facility in the subbasement. He'd never bothered to look there. Three doctors were hunched over Lex's arm—the bones of the forearm were intact, but they just stopped where the wristbones should have joined them. An anaesthesiologist was checking Lex's vitals worriedly. "—not responding," she finished as Clark tuned in. Another side effect of Lex's meteor-enhanced healing, Clark realized: Lex was throwing off sedation and painkillers as fast as they could be pumped into him.
"We can't do it," the lead doctor said. "Mr. Luthor, I'm sorry, but the healing of the stump is too far advanced, and the hand—it seems to be suffering accelerated decomposition." Clark flicked his gaze over to the refrigerated unit at the side of the operating table. What he saw inside didn't look like it could have belonged to a living human. He'd seen a lot of death and destruction, bodies torn and burnt, but he still had to fight back the nausea.
Probably this, too, was meteor-related. Whatever unnatural vitality Lex possessed had been taken back, like his hand was Dorian Grey's picture.
Lex still hadn't said anything.
"Mr. Luthor?" the doctor prompted. The other two backed away, presumably wanting to get out of the line of fire.
Lex opened his eyes. His skin temperature was low, too low to be accounted for by the chill of the operating room. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his temples. His jaw worked. "Thank you, Dr. Houn," he said at last. "Please do what you need to do to close up, then schedule a consult about a prosthetic with my assistant."
Clark fell back against the wall, staring up at nothing.
"I need to reschedule three campaign appearances," Mercy said sharply, startling him. "You're not welcome here."
Clark meant to snap back at her, but he couldn't figure out a thing to say.
"I'm sorry, was I unclear?" Mercy asked, honey over cayenne. "Get out or you'll be picking Kryptonite out of every square inch of your superheroic hide."
Clark went.
****
Lex wouldn't have thought that his right hand was all that useful, and his healing factor had gotten him through the phantom itch more quickly than he'd had any right to hope. But it was shocking how intensely he missed his previous symmetry. As it turned out, the nondominant hand was still extremely useful, or at least its absence extremely frustrating when he tried to do simple tasks like dressing himself, or soaping up in the shower, or answering email.
It was a good thing he hadn't let himself think about his plan too much before enacting it, because even a minute's thought would have convinced him that it was the stupidest sacrifice since the Bay of Pigs.
He'd done a brief press appearance, shown off a temporary prosthesis under a black leather glove. All signs indicated that the 'accident' wasn't going to affect the election. It was just too weird for voters to process, and as long as he didn't show the stump in public he was unlikely to trigger a serious aversive response, or so his staff psychologists told him.
Funnily enough, he wasn't all that worried about the election any more.
Maybe he ought to be questioning his fitness for the post. After all, a president had to be prepared to send people to die. Done right, that would require at least as much bravery as walking into mortal danger oneself—and Lex had never wanted to do it wrong.
But a president got to order people who volunteered; a president got to order people who voted.
No, that was all window dressing: the fact of the matter was, Lex couldn't be the one who sent Clark to his death against his will and he couldn't be the one who kept Clark away from his glorious goddamned mission to save humanity against his will. He refused to be the man who used Clark as a hammer, an object to be deployed if and only if it suited Lex's desires. And it would come to that, even if Lex resisted the first time: look how well he'd done turning down Clark's physical attentions. Forced fucking only contaminated him; abusing Clark's other abilities ran the risk of destroying the world.
All Clark's other blame, that was just the price of living, the decisions Lex had made that had seemed right, or at least necessary, at the time. Lex's sins were investigative, protective, occasionally wrathful. He always had reasons, defenses, excuses for Clark.
Not this time.
Almost worse than losing the hand was that he'd surrendered every inch of contested ground in the battle with Clark. Clark would take Lex's gesture (no pun intended, he thought, and smiled) as confirmation that his simplistic view of the world was right and that Lex agreed, underneath it all. Lex might still win the election, but as between the two of them, he was worse off than he'd been before the Ritual of Rao.
"Lex?" Clark's voice from behind him was tentative, coddling. So it began.
He closed his eyes. He'd have to remember to reprogram the doors to the penthouse. "Do we have business?" He made himself swivel his chair to face Clark. The temporary prosthesis couldn't clench its fingers, which was a reminder that he should keep his left hand relaxed. "Or is it perhaps pleasure that brings you?"
Clark went pale, or as pale as a golden idol like Clark could get. "You let me go," he said.
"I take it as an unpleasant judgment on humanity that 'Superman' refers to brawn and not brains."
Clark, shockingly, looked hurt for a moment. "I mean—" When he stopped, drew breath, and smiled—just a little, a curve of the lips that promised nothing tolerable—Lex knew that he was in worse trouble than he'd imagined. "How many more body parts do you think you can sacrifice before you have to talk to me for real?"
Lex fought his body to stillness. "I had thought that the point of losing the hand was to avoid talking to you at all."
"That's not going to work," Clark said, as predictable as ever. "I've been trying to understand why, what would make you decide to give up the greatest weapon you've ever had." Lex didn't contest the description; Clark was speaking with accuracy, not self-love. "But then—tell me, Lex: why did you tell me not to go after Doomsday?"
Lex clenched his hand, hard. "Again: I'm not discussing this with you."
Clark sighed. "Fine. Then you're going to sit here and watch the interview I just gave to Lois."
He couldn't outrun Clark, and shooting him with the reserve Kryptonite gun would be an overreaction even for him, so he gritted his teeth and pulled up the Planet's website.
Clark was sitting on a too-small chair, squirming as he looked down at his lap, at his bare wrist.
"How are you doing?" Lane asked, almost softly, and Clark's head jerked up, his eyes widening in surprise. She started to roll her eyes and then rather obviously realized that the camera could pick that up, so she cleared her throat. "What can you tell us about the accident?"
Clark, never good at PR, ignored the camera and stared straight at Lane. "Thanks for your concern. Uh, I don't really know what happened. I was away on League business and—Lex hasn't been able to tell me much. From what I know, the explosion happened very fast and the accounts are still pretty confused."
Lex needed to revise his judgment on Clark's ability to deal with the press. Clark was, after all, a political reporter, and he'd had a great deal of experience with deflection. That answer was an elegant diversion, making it sound like Lex didn't remember much. He was trying to forget; holding his hand in place to be crushed by heavy machinery was just about the worst thing he'd ever made himself do—it made him nostalgic for eating grubs and talking to his imaginary friend Louis.
"Is the accident related to the fact that you're no longer wearing your bracelet?" Lane leaned forward a tad, as if she planned on jumping Clark and sticking her tongue down his throat if he announced that he had separated from Lex.
Clark pasted on an expression that bore about as much relation to a smile as a three-year-old's drawing of a person resembled a photograph. "Uh. It's kind of, a private thing. Culturally. Actually, I've been thinking. I'll always be Kryptonian. But I'm also an American, and—it's time Lex and I made it official the American way."
Lane's response to such an obviously juicy statement was practically Pavlovian; she was lucky she didn't need to wipe the drool off of her chin. "And what is the American way, in this case?"
Clark smiled, the real one this time, supernova-bright even through the Superman illusion that distorted his face. "I guess that depends on where we're living six months from now."
Lex stopped the replay. He was grateful that his limbs worked. A lesser man would have asked a stupid question like, 'Did you just propose to me on camera?'
He cleared his throat. "Why did you propose to me on camera?"
"Uh, because apparently we only talk to other people about the fact that we can't actually live without each other?"
Lex turned. His face was inches from Clark's. Clark had turned off his Superman face, but it was still the same smile. "I can live without you," Lex told him, except that it came out a tad too breathless for comfort.
"You can live without saying it out loud, I'll give you that. But, Lex, you kind of showed your hand—" Clark turned bright red and even Lex was struck speechless at the utter inappropriateness.
They stared at each other, frozen, until Lex couldn't contain his laughter. It hurt—especially when he tried to clutch at his stomach and only managed half the job—but it was pure Smallville-era Clark, awkward and with no sense of social grace, and somehow that was exactly what Lex needed to hear.
When he managed to stop wheezing, Lex saw that Clark had retreated a couple of feet, but he still had his determined Man of Steel expression.
"When I'm leader of the free world, I'm going to order you around and you're going to do what I ask," Lex warned.
Clark considered him, head tilted a little. Lex knew he wasn't being scanned with X-ray vision, because that wouldn't give Clark any further insights, but he still had to stop himself from squirming. "Probably," he said. "When you make a case for it."
Part of Lex, the part most powerfully formed by reaction to his father, wanted to be angry at the prospect of endless battles, always having to prove his bona fides. A smaller but active part thought it might be the most interesting challenge he could give himself.
"Would you like to hear a case made for the virtues of oral sex?"
Clark's blush, which had faded, returned in full force. Lex was oddly charmed. "I'm willing to take that one on faith," Clark said quickly. And then there was very little of consequence to say.
****
"So," Jon Stewart said, "Superman and Lex Luthor got rid of their promise bracelets, causing screams of outrage in the fashion world. What will they do with all their unsold inventory now?" There was a picture, which Lex profoundly hoped had been photoshopped, of crates of sluglike gray bracelets engraved with Superman's crest spilling out onto Canal Street.
"The real question on everyone's lips is, what were the bracelets for?" he continued. "Superman says it's a cultural thing; all I can say is, Kryptonians better not have worshipped Xenu, or Superman's going to confront the only force that could truly defeat him: Scientology." Pause; smirk. "Nah, that's just crazy talk. So, the bracelets' real function—I'm thinking bleep-bleep." Lex could lip-read 'cock ring.' The audience roared. "I'm just saying, that Superman outfit is designed to make really clear that 'Superman' isn't false advertising."
Strangely, Lex was starting to find seeing his life played out on a fake news show rather comforting. Given how many entirely preposterous things had happened to him, fake news seemed just about right.
"Of course, you know what this means." He shifted to falsetto and wriggled his hands: "Wedding of the century. Will they wait until Luthor's in the White House? Given those pictures from a couple months ago, the First Residence will be the only thing about them entitled to wear white. Ooh, and then: Superman, as first—well, first superhero, I guess; Superman gets to redecorate." The screen showed a picture of the White House merged with the Fortress of Solitude, the whole thing looking like a Freudian nightmare of ice phalluses. Lex rather liked it.
"Maybe that's too much; maybe he'll just pick out some new china." This time the picture showed Clark, smiling uncomfortably, photomanipulated so that he was holding one of the collectible plastic plates McDonald's had issued back when the League was just getting started, the one with Batman's sigil on it. "Or is that in bad taste, to have a constant reminder of your exes around?" Lex choked a little on his drink. "Come on, what do you think those guys do up in that tower, away from the rest of the world, while they're waiting for some crisis to resolve? Think about it: first thing you'd do with superpowers, you'd take 'em for a little spin underneath the sheets. Or floating above the sheets." He raised his eyebrows and grinned out at the audience, which was applauding.
Lex took another swallow and thought that Bruce was probably less happy with the monologue than he was. And really, he could live with that.
"Lex?" Clark called from the bedroom. "Turn off the computer and get in here."
Lex didn't have to obey.
He just felt like it.
END
comments on DW; comments on LJ
Tags:
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
If I'd known how popular Jon Stewart would be, I'd've been putting him in every story for a while now!