Eight(ish) Crazy Nights: Eight (SV)

[rivkat]

partners4life: futurefic, Clark/Lex; Lex finds out Clark and he have a son (Kon); Lex sues Superman/Clark for custody and child support; Clark's lawyer advises him to try to work things out with Lex by any means possible otherwise Lex's attorneys will bankrupt him. Note: I thought Lex could probably afford the child support aspects, so I tweaked a little.

“I won’t give him the genetic material. He says it’s to make sure Kon stays healthy, but I don’t believe him."

Clark’s lawyer tapped her pen on the papers spread out before her. “The fines could be substantial. You could lose everything.”

“I don’t have anything!”

Ms. Walters shook her head. “Secret identities aside—and don’t discount that the court could well order you to disclose yours, in the interests of both determining your assets and evaluating your fitness—you’ve established an LLC for your charitable work and licensing activities, which could be implicated. Transferring a trademark where that’s the only asset isn’t unknown; OJ Simpson ended up losing his right of publicity.”

Clark swallowed miserably. “I didn’t really pay attention to the corporate side. B—the Justice League had a team they worked with, and I just used the same people and signed what they told me to. I don’t care about the money, but I don’t want to lose control of my name. It’s the mark of my house, an ancient Kryptonian symbol. I can’t—and my identity. If I have to give it up, a lot of people will be in danger.”

“I’ll fight for you until they have to dig my teeth out of Luthor’s lawyers,” Ms. Walters promised. “And I’ll mark them up some. But I can tell you now: chances aren’t good that you get to protect everything and still keep Kon. My advice: do whatever you need to do to settle this. Possibly a personal appeal.”

Clark wanted to snort, but he was too miserable. The only personal appeal Lex would be likely to accept would involve Clark on his knees.

… But it was for Kon. An innocent. He couldn’t hand Kon over to Lex, not if there was any alternative.

“Thanks,” he said, and went to do what needed to be done.

Not that it was that easy. First he had to get through security at the penthouse, which wasn’t all that difficult. Then there was Mercy, which was slightly more challenging, but he deployed a move he’d been saving for a while and deposited her, cursing and hogtied, in a location that would require all of her ingenuity and at least five hours to escape. Finally, there was Lex.

A tightening of Lex’s jaw was all the reaction Lex allowed himself. “Talk to my lawyers,” he ordered, then went back to his computer.

“I think you’d prefer to be the one watching this,” Clark said, and knelt.

Lex’s haughty expression blanked to pure shock when he saw Clark’s position.

“What is this?” he asked, voice higher than usual.

“You know I can’t afford to fight you in court. And you know I can’t allow you even greater access to the Kryptonian genome. So I’m offering you something else.” Lex’s face was lit up with the greedy fascination Clark remembered from Smallville, when he’d mistaken it for friendship. Clark steeled himself to continue: “You don’t really want Kon.” Like that, he’d lost Lex, who sneered and stood so fast that his chair rattled backwards, towards the big plate glass windows.

Lex turned away and looked down at his city. “No deal.”

“Lex—”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Lex asked, flint-sharp, “that I care for Kon and he cares for me?”

“If you really cared for him—”

“Try that afterschool special line on me and I will salt Metropolis with so much Kryptonite you’ll get sick looking at it on Google Maps,” Lex said savagely.

“What do you want?” Clark asked, terrified of the answer but needing to know.

Lex hissed. “That’s a very interesting question,” he said after a moment. “Honestly, it’s one to which I’ve often sought the answer myself. There are certain things that even you can’t deliver, so we’ll set those aside. However—if you’re so concerned about Kon’s welfare, then: I want you to join us. See if you can save Kon from the Luthor curse.”

“Join you?” Clark asked numbly.

“I don’t mean that you should quit your day job. Or your extracurriculars, though one must wonder about the toll such extensive activities take on the ability to raise a child. I mean that you’d live in my house and share my bed. If you do that, you’re welcome to do your best to indoctrinate our child in your stunningly pedestrian values.”

“Yes,” Clark said before he’d given it a second’s consideration. Then he wanted to throw up. But Lex looked like Clark had just transformed into a frog—no, Lex would have been less surprised by that. Clark needed to be with Kon—he needed his son, and he needed to protect his son from Lex. (He wondered, suddenly, if Lillian Luthor had felt the same. It wasn’t a helpful thought, and he pushed it away.) “I’ll have my lawyer draw up the agreement.”

Lex blinked rapidly as Clark stood up. “I—”

“Or was that not a real offer?” A lie, Clark meant, but he didn’t need to say it.

Lex’s mouth firmed. “Fine. I want you moved in by the end of the week.”

Clark nodded, then, on impulse, sped over to where Lex was standing and, before Lex could react, pulled him into a kiss. Lex was rigid with shock, then surged against Clark’s unyielding mouth and hands. When Clark pulled back, he felt flushed and saw his reaction mirrored in Lex’s eyes. But neither of them would back down, he already knew that.

He was pretty sure they were headed for a disaster explosive enough to take down LuthorCorp tower. But he was even more certain that they were going to do it anyway.

niangao: anything involving Kara from Useful Arts?

“… fifty tons of maple syrup,” Lex was saying when she marched into his office. He looked up and offered her a harried smile.

“Don’t bring me into your sordid sexual fantasies,” she told him and grinned.

He hit the mute button. “Believe me, my sexual fantasies involve many fewer calories,” he said, “especially where you’re concerned.”

Which was a little bit of a low blow, except that she’d started it, so she had to give him that one. “You busy?”

In answer, Lex pointed to the Great Seal on the floor, and hit the button to resume his conversation with the worriedly squawking voice on the other side. Kara got herself a cup of coffee and perched on the least slippery of the couches (she was pretty sure Lex had ordered them designed precisely so that visitors had to devote a bunch of mental effort to not falling on their butts, since Lex was apt to take the concept of ‘off balance’ literally, but Lex had never admitted as much to her).

Eventually, the Cabinet officers and heads of state were beaten back, at least for the moment, and Lex came around his desk to join her.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he said, and how he could make a line like that sound sincere was one of the great mysteries, along with why she liked that one terrible show on the CW.

She took a deep breath. “It’s possible that there are pictures of me leaving the White House in the middle of the night.”

Lex didn’t look perturbed. “You’re assigned to my security, that’s nothing new.”

“It’s possible that I may have had sex hair and that I may have been coming from the second floor residence.”

“Kara—” Now Lex was engaged, heading towards mad. Kara took a quick look around to spot the priceless artworks that she should probably try to protect once Lex started throwing things.

“In my defense, he was really, really good.” She couldn’t help the little smile, reminiscing.

“Who--? No, don’t tell me, I’d hate to have to order a political assassination this early in my term.”

Kara thought about naming names anyway, but the only fun part of this was going to be watching Lex figure it out for himself. And he would; given a mystery involving a Kryptonian, he’d pull it apart like a gourmet going after a lobster.

“So, heads up. I hear TMZ’s posting the pictures at 1 am tonight, and you’d know better than anyone how fast it’ll blow up.”

Lex glared at her, then visibly relaxed his shoulders and leaned back. “You know, half the country’s going to think I’m a god.”

“That’s because they don’t know how low my standards are.”

Lex nodded acknowledgement—he still wasn’t over the Flash thing, poor guy. “Well, so much for school reform this month.”

She winced. “I am sorry. I didn’t know they’d improved the shutter speed that much.”

“Neither did I,” Lex said, looking thoughtful. “All right, I’m going to start making calls. Try not to say anything too disastrous when you inevitably get caught by the press, okay?”

“Wow, I’m totally inspired to be loyal.” But she grinned at him. She was definitely going to have to find an awesome way to make this up to him. She’d ask Clark, except that Clark’s ideas were always conventional—romantic, yeah, but Kara needed a standout. Maybe she could go get him that hydrocarbon-rich asteroid he’d been hinting about.

Lex’s enemies-to-friends ratio was almost astonishingly top-heavy. But Kara was pretty confident that quality trumped quantity, and she was prepared to prove it.

jakrar: Suppose, just before Brainiac and the Zod-minions escaped doomed Krypton, someone tried to disable Zod's super-computer with an untested computer virus, and it had an unexpected effect: once Brainiac reached Earth, instead of being determined to carry out Zod's plans, he decided instead to do everything he could to make Lex Luthor happy (but without informing Lex Luthor)... Note: more on the horror side, less with the Clark/Lex, though feel free to imagine that’s how it ends!

Lex froze in the doorway. He’d hallucinated this before, seen it in nightmares after the storm his first year in Smallville, even fantasized about it.

This, though, felt real.

“What are you doing?” he asked Fine. His voice sounded normal. The volume was standard. Only the fact that it was a truly idiotic question gave him away.

Fine rose liquidly from where he’d been crouched by Lionel’s head. “I was confirming brain death.”

“Why did you kill him?” There, a much better question. Lex felt his pulse throb in his hands. If Fine came for him, there’d be nothing Lex could do. He was no kind of son to worry about that now, but he’d known that about himself for a long time.

Fine approached, crossing the space like a cheetah, all speed and whipcord muscle. “The things he’s done to you, Lex. Death was a gift.” He was close enough to reach out and snap Lex’s neck just as easily. His voice was soft, what Lex thought someone else might call tender. “I know you are not pleased now, but you should be. You will be.”

“What’s your agenda here?” He could think of so many. Frame Lex for the murder—obvious, and easy. Dispose of the body, but keep the threat hanging over Lex. Something else having to do with all that extraterrestrial research Fine knew so much about. Fine and the artifact had shown up at almost exactly the same time, and there were no coincidences in Smallville.

“You are my agenda, Lex.” Fine’s blue eyes were as clear and untroubled as Clark’s greener ones had been, when they’d first met. Clark had never offered him this, though, not even the times he’d been out of his mind.

“And why are you so concerned with my well-being?” Lex was starting to hear the cracks in his voice. Well, with his father heading rapidly towards rigor mortis, homeostasis ceased and bacteria about to start going crazy, Lex was perhaps entitled to a little breakdown, and he’d be all over that if he didn’t need to save his own life.

Fine smiled, Mona Lisa with a switchblade up her sleeve. “I believe you have a fairy tale, about a man who’s cursed to fall in love with the first person he sees? My story isn’t quite that, but it’s close enough. I know it’s a lot to absorb, and we have so much more work to do. I’ve altered the video records so that it looks like a stroke, and I’ll finish the cleanup in a few minutes. Go over, check his pulse, and call 911. You’ll be perfectly safe. In a few days, when the tumult has died down, we’ll speak again.”

With that, he blinked out of existence, another shock that Lex barely noticed.

Nearly stumbling on numb feet, he made his way over to his father, just as Fine had directed. He didn’t want to follow the man’s advice, but if he cried foul—he was going to be a suspect in Lionel’s death regardless, and it seemed that he needed Fine’s help to avoid blame for something he didn’t do. Lex knew far too much about how the world regarded Luthors to think that innocence would make any difference, either in the public eye or the legal system.

He pulled his cellphone from his jacket, then dropped it to the marble floor, where it bounced and skidded. He had to crawl to get it, away from his father’s corpse, and then he had to lean up against the wall paneling, ridged and uncomfortable, to keep himself steady enough to dial.

“It’s my father,” he said to the dispatcher, and had no idea how he sounded or how he should sound. “I think he’s—I think he’s dead.” He hung up before hearing how long the response would be, though God knew he donated enough money to local emergency services that they should come quickly.

Lex was alone, now. He had a billion dollars and a mysteriously knowledgeable maniac mangling the B plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What Fine might choose to do for him next—

Lex closed his eyes. He’d get this under control, the way he always did. He’d do it before Fine figured out his next set of fantasies and set out to make them just as horribly real. If there was anything Lex knew, it was that he wasn’t allowed to get what he wanted: only shadows that were worse than failure, because they looked so much like what he’d desired.

Lionel was dead, and maybe that was for the betterment of the world. But Lex wasn’t going to allow Fine to turn his attention to Clark.

Somebody might really get hurt.



END