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Eight Crazy Nights 7: Smallville
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jakrar: Original prompt: Smallville - Clex: Lex has a more dramatic power than mutant healing, and his first adult meeting with Clark highlights Lex's power rather than any of Clark's. So...would Clark go crazy trying to find out what Lex can do, and why?
Lex got cocky, he’d have to concede. Careless, even. As dangerous as Smallville turned out to be—his initial childhood meteor-shower introduction and subsequent car-crash return were perfectly representative—he’d been keeping himself out of harm’s way by judicious application of his superpower. With practice, he’d even learned to restart the clock while he was in something other than his original position relative to the rest of the Earth.
Furthermore, he’d painstakingly taught himself how to insert himself into a position of interest (in front of a secret LuthorCorp report on meteor rocks, for instance) and flicker into relative time and back out again, no more than an afterimage that caused someone’s head to snap up with an uneasy but completely unverifiable feeling of being observed. It wasn’t an ideal power, but it was a hell of a lot better than most of the alternatives, and Lex had spent a long time thinking about its highest and best uses.
Given how easy it was to incapacitate even the heartiest of meteor mutants when one had hours of subjective time to plan containment, he’d grown arrogant with success. He’d forgotten just how many ways there were to cause harm other than direct attack, and then he found himself married to a woman who tried to kill him. Freeze this, her pheremones told his ardor, and her pheromones won.
But always there was Clark, circling around him. Investigating, along with his little blonde friend. Clark, who somehow stopped Desiree before Lex had shaken off her spell long enough to dodge Jonathan Kent’s bullet.
Meteor rocks didn’t seem to grant the same power twice, though a certain ability to bounce up after getting hit seemed to be baseline, so Lex was thinking speed rather than its opposite for Clark’s power. He’d like to know more, but frankly he was so busy ferreting out his father’s secrets and keeping his own that he didn’t have time for a farmboy, however intriguing. Clark was young; he’d keep. (Lex sometimes wondered whether he was aging during these frozen moments. Whether he’d end up withered before his time, Dorian Grey in reverse. Nothing worked in the world unless he was touching it, so he wasn’t tempted to finish his abandoned dissertation experiments in the cracks between minutes. But there was a peace to be found in the world of statues. No matter how much contempt they showed him while they moved, they were all his to contemplate and control when he flexed his mutant power.)
He wanted to reward Clark for saving him from Desiree, but he knew by now that grand gestures would end badly with people like the Kents. So he wrote Clark a note, sincere and short, suggesting that any future help he could offer would be gladly given.
He hadn’t expected Clark to take him up on it so soon, though. Not a week later, he was getting his coffee at the Starbucks franchise Nell Potter had managed to start in the old theater when Clark appeared at his side. “Can I talk to you?” he asked.
Lex had spent many months trying to dodge Clark’s questions about what had happened on the bridge, and his extremely distracting lips and blushing cheeks and marble-worthy jawline. But he did owe Clark. Clark would have survived that scarecrow even if Lex hadn’t come along, but Clark had saved his life from Desiree’s murderous intentions. “Of course,” he said, and let Clark lead him off to the side.
They sat, and Lex busied himself with his coffee, only allowing himself surreptitious glances at Clark. Who had, impossibly, gotten more attractive in the past year, not to mention substantially closer to legal. No, Lex reminded himself, this would end badly even if he didn’t try to kill you like the rest of them.
Clark didn’t seem inclined to have the aforementioned talk, and Lex was content to sit and contemplate the thickness of his lashes—the boy could have walked a runway, it was appalling that he was stuck in the middle of nowhere—until Clark figured out his purpose.
“Chloe says you can teleport,” Clark finally said, blushing furiously.
Lex raised an eyebrow. That was a decent deduction, given her information. “I can’t,” he said, which had the unusual virtue of being the complete truth.
Clark was already nodding. “I told her … But you are one, right?”
“That’s a personal question, isn’t it?” It wasn’t as if Clark had admitted his own status in the few veiled conversations they’d had about the matter, even after Desiree.
“You—sometimes it’s like you’re there, and then you’re not, and then you’re back again. And it’s always when something happens.”
Lex would have to be more careful. If a couple of high-schoolers could figure it out, admittedly with some inside knowledge, then there was no telling who else could. (Father, he thought, and shuddered involuntarily.)
“I don’t know what to tell you, Clark,” and that too was the truth. “You know that being known as a meteor mutant is at least as dangerous as being one.”
It wasn’t an admission, but it was closer than he should have come. Clark had that effect on him, drugging, addictive. Desiree’s appeal was as artificial as saccharin by comparison.
“I can keep a secret, Lex,” Clark said, and reached across the table. His fingers brushed the back of Lex’s hand, hot and electric. “If you trust me, maybe I can help you.”
The very thought that a farmboy had help a Luthor needed was—but that was his father’s thought.
Clark’s eyes were a thousand different colors, Lex thought.
“Your mother is working for my father,” he said, forcing the words out. “Even inadvertently, there are things—”
“There are things I don’t tell my parents,” Clark said, leaning in. His hand covered Lex’s. This, Lex thought distantly, was a moment he wanted to freeze, but then he’d be alone. Suddenly it seemed tragic that he’d never get to show Clark the wonders of the time-locked world, bullets as firmly fixed in place as skyscrapers. “Lex—”
“Not here,” Lex managed, because people would be watching, and there was no way to stop gossip even for a man who could stop time. “Come by the mansion later.”
This was the worst idea in Lex’s truly extensive history of ill-considered impulses. But Lex had been in love, and it had been fake, and Clark had saved him.
Maybe that same strength could save him again.
forarysteia: Clark's graduation and all Lex's feels
He isn’t some old friend who can sneak in the back, unobserved. Even in Metropolis, someone would recognize him; here, the game is over before it starts, with the small consolation that no one’s going to be taking pictures of him surreptitiously and sending them to the gossip sites.
So his choices are to sail in proudly, as if he had any business being here (obsessed with a teenager, his father’s voice whispers), or to skip.
Or, none of the above: it’s trivial to have one of the school’s security cameras—paid for with a LuthorCorp grant, and given student mortality rates a decent investment—rerouted, so that he can watch with no one else any wiser.
Clark’s in the middle of the alphabet, the sole way in which he is no standout. Taller than all the rest, straight-shouldered and resplendent in his red gown with the wide yellow trim: Smallville’s finest product.
Lex has just been dealing with the dead body of a woman he knew reasonably well, and mostly respected. He’s just been handling Lana and her secrets. Yet his strongest emotion is for this event: just another thing that Clark Kent gets that a Luthor could never have (his graduation was attended by prime ministers, captains of industry, and two Oscar winners, but he was high in the vestry for most of the event) and that Clark wears with grace and even joy.
He’s not even jealous. Clark radiates his desert. Clark is in the sunlight; Lex is in darkness, staring at his computer as he waits for more information on the crystals. It seems appropriate. There are many uses for darkness, more perhaps than for light.
And, Lex has come to understand, Clark’s light shines more brightly in contrast. If Clark will allow him nothing else, Lex is willing to provide that.
... and foravidrosette: Smallville, Clark/Lex, what if Clark's experience of pleasure had been as muffled as his experience of pain, leaving him desperate to feel? NC-17; Self-harm; BDSM elements.
In Clark’s head, it went like this:
Lex ran his curled fist along the line of Clark’s cheek, a parody of a caress. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said. The Kryptonite of his ring scraped Clark’s skin, a line of agony, and Clark couldn’t even groan, flat on the ground and waiting for Lex’s next blow.
Lex pulled back, elegant even in his crouch, and examined Clark’s body like it was a sculpture he was considering buying. Clark closed his eyes and tried to gather his strength.
“… Wait,” Lex said, revelation lighting up his voice, and it wasn’t just nausea making Clark’s stomach tighten. “You like this.”
Back in his apartment, Clark gasped and came, his fingers so tight around himself that he would’ve turned coal into diamond. The Planet’s sex columnist advised male readers to try different approaches, loose grips and tight grips, short strokes and long ones, so they wouldn’t get to the point where sex with a partner was difficult. Clark was well beyond that point, and had been for a long time.
****
It wasn’t until a week after Lex Luthor had released him from the scarecrow that Clark could think about it without wanting to throw up. He’d never felt like that. Pain: how his mother felt when she burned her fingers on a dish hot from the oven, or Dad when he hammered his hand instead of the nail.
As the Smallville meteor freakshow accelerated, pain became a more regular visitor. Clark hated it, because it meant that people were in danger. He hated the way meteor mutants would throw him around when he was weak from exposure.
It took him a while to realize that he didn’t have a problem with the pain itself. At first he thought he’d kept Lana’s necklace, safe in its armored box, because he wanted something that had been close to Lana. He’d open the lid every few days, making sure it was still there, flinching at the wave of weakness that hit him as the meteor rock flared brilliantly green.
Eventually, he started opening it every night.
****
Like a priest, Clark had a vocation. He wouldn’t trade being Superman for human touches. He’d lost his powers before, and it had always, always ended badly. Since the very first time, he’d known that, and he hadn’t even been able to appreciate the ability to feel sensations, too busy thinking about how to get his powers back. Red Kryptonite provided the urge but not the capability; he’d ended up cutting himself with green Kryptonite he’d shaped into a knife.
When he’d lost the red K ring, he’d kept the knife.
And when Lois twisted and wriggled because the tag of her shirt was rubbing at her the wrong way, or when Jimmy yelped and swatted at the ant that was tickling his leg, Clark wanted.
****
He had it under control. Yes, he knew that plenty of self-injurers said that, but he was invulnerable and healed as soon as he shut his lead box, which meant he wasn’t taking the same kinds of risks. And he’d learned well that he had to let people make their own choices, even bad ones; why shouldn’t the same charity apply to him? He literally wasn’t hurting anyone else.
****
His tolerance was pretty high now. Mere exposure didn’t shake him up the way it used to, which had major benefits for those times that bad guys got their hands on Kryptonite—he was physically vulnerable, yes, but he could slog through that, and he borrowed technology from Bruce to harden his uniform for those situations.
Clark wasn’t going to pretend that was the reason he did it: he lied to enough people in his life. But he wasn’t going to deny the benefits of his … sensation-seeking, either.
****
When Lex did find out, the revelation was almost anticlimactic. Clark had made it his business not to be in the same room with Lex for the last few decades, except when a Superman-Luthor confrontation occurred by accident. (The one thing Superman knew that Clark hadn’t was that Lex didn’t react well to lectures; Superman had to teach his lessons through public exposure and private enforcement, neither of which required direct contact.)
Then Lex was elected, and there was a whole thing about the Justice League and sovereignty, lots of shouting and fearmongering, and somehow Lex managed to be the one to get them to Camp David to negotiate a modus operandi.
Of course Superman was at the center of the photo op, right by the President’s side. When Lex shook Clark’s hand for the cameras, he leaned in and said, “I’m sorry about earlier.”
Clark just managed to stop the un-Supermanlike “hunh?” that wanted to come out. Smallville earlier? Metropolis earlier? He raised one eyebrow instead—cool and collected. Pure Superman.
“I was stepping on your foot the entire time they were arranging the rest of the participants for the photo,” Lex said, smiling as the cameras clicked. “It was entirely unintentional, I assure you.”
“Oh,” Clark said. “Not a problem.”
“No, I suppose not,” Lex said. If Clark had looked, he probably could have seen Lex’s tricky, convoluted neurons firing.
And when Clark asked, Bruce provided the (highly illegally obtained, but what Clark couldn’t stop he could use) footage of Lex in the Oval Office, reviewing the footage of fight after fight, captured on cellphones and high-tech news cameras and everything in between, always focusing in on Clark.
****
So when the call came, routed untraceably through the Watchtower, Clark was pretty much expecting it.
“I won’t pretend we’re friends,” Lex said, and even now Clark felt a pang. If Lex knew—but Lex already knew too much. “But it seems to me that I can provide something that you want, and I very much want to give it to you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark said, weakly.
“Do you really want me to say it while Batman is listening?” Lex didn’t wait long for Clark’s non-answer. “You have my word that any deal we make will conform to your parameters.”
Lex could well be telling the truth. The pure satisfaction of beating Superman up might suffice for him.
Someone else—Lex—touching him, making him feel it. Not in danger, not real, but real enough.
“I’ll come to the White House,” Clark said. (And rip out Bruce’s cameras while he was at it, despite the paranoiac fit Bruce was going to throw.)
****
“You’ll need a safe word,” Lex said, standing in his terrifying, lead-lined lab buried underneath the White House. Some presidents installed bowling alleys; Lex picked state-of-the-art centrifuges. He was turned away from Clark, inspecting his domain. He sounded bored, except that Clark had known Lex far longer than Lex imagined.
“Lex,” he said without thinking, and Lex turned in an instant, his eyes widening. If Clark could have felt anything, he would have felt the weight of that gaze. Clark swallowed. “That’s my safe word.”
Lex’s jaw clenched. “Very well,” he said. “Take your clothes off and get on the table.”
It was shiny silver, clinical: everything Clark had ever feared from Lex. Level 3, but run by the most powerful man on Earth.
Clark was shaking as he undressed, leaving his uniform in a puddle on the slick white floor. Lex’s eyes on him were unflinching, though Lex didn’t order him to face forward, maybe because it was just as disconcerting to have Lex at his back.
The table would’ve been cold, for a human. Clark sat on the edge, nervously curling his fingers around and struggling not to crush the metal between them. He hadn’t had this much trouble controlling his strength in years.
“Lie down,” Lex said, gentle in victory.
This was the stupidest thing Clark had ever done, and his career of dumb impulse decisions was storied.
Clark closed his eyes. Shortly thereafter, he felt the shock of Kryptonite roll over him.
If Lex cut deep, he’d make Lex stop. He shouldn’t trust Lex to stop.
He did trust Lex to stop. After all, Clark’s surrender—Superman’s surrender—was a victory all its own. The power to stop was a huge one.
“Shh,” Lex said, almost dreamily. He hadn’t realized he’d been making noise.
“You look …” Lex said, and uncharacteristically trailed off. Clark knew he was unattractive like this, veins bulging and making his alienness undeniable. If the rest of the world saw this, he’d lose many of his supporters even without the part where he was getting Lex Luthor to hurt him in the service of his own sexual pleasure.
Lex’s hand on his stomach was such a shock that he almost convulsed, clenching his fists and opening his eyes. Lex was barely touching him. Maybe not even touching, just holding his fingers close enough that Clark could feel their heat.
Clark blinked up at him, confused. Lex wasn’t even holding a scalpel. His fists weren’t clenched, ready to pummel Clark into a momentary mass of bruises.
There were storms in his eyes like the storms Clark sometimes watched from orbit.
“You’re going to want to hang on,” Lex advised, and then leaned over to take the head of Clark’s dick in his mouth.
Clark had been hit by lightning before. This was nothing like that. The pleasure seemed to start in his spine and roll out in huge waves, arching his spine and blasting through every nerve.
He came before Lex had gotten halfway down the length of his dick, and Lex choked for a second but swallowed, cheeks working as he stared up at Clark across the span of Clark’s body. It seemed to last forever, and when it was over, Clark was boneless on the table, staring up at the bright lights of the lab ceiling and wondering if he was ever going to be able to move again.
There was a rustle as Lex pulled away—he hadn’t even loosened his tie—and Clark felt the familiar ebb as the Kryptonite’s effect disappeared.
What the—?
Dazedly, he pushed himself back up to a seated position. Lex was putting his lead-lined box back into some sort of safe, tapping in a code. There were probably other things in that safe that Clark needed to know about for his day job. He couldn’t have cared about that to save his life.
“L—Mr. President?”
Lex turned to him, raising one fine eyebrow. “I trust that was satisfactory.”
That was one word for it. “Uh, should I—” Lex’s pants were tented, obscene. Clark wanted to open the Kryptonite box again, touch him, spend an hour learning the shape of every muscle.
Lex glanced down at himself and grimaced dismissively. “I’m sure you have other business. One of the Secret Service can show you out.”
And before Clark could begin to formulate a response, much less a question, he was gone.
Clark sat there, mind all but blank, for some time. As various kinds of intelligence came back online, he realized that he was so far out of his depth that he might have been at the heart of the sun.
But Lex—
Lex wanted him.
He didn’t know what that meant. Maybe they couldn’t ever be allies, much less friends like they’d been when he was only Clark and Lex was only Lex. But now he knew a lot more than Lex had, probably, wanted to reveal.
Before he left, he supersped into the Oval Office, where Lex was alone, reading reports.
“Next time,” he said, and Lex’s head snapped up, “I want you to use a knife first.”
The look of total surprise on Lex’s face was worth all the stomach-clenching fear he felt if he tried to think about the larger picture. Clark had learned over the years how to take risks—and Lex had told him that he could have this on his terms.
He planned to see just how serious Lex was about that.
jakrar: Original prompt: Smallville - Clex: Lex has a more dramatic power than mutant healing, and his first adult meeting with Clark highlights Lex's power rather than any of Clark's. So...would Clark go crazy trying to find out what Lex can do, and why?Lex got cocky, he’d have to concede. Careless, even. As dangerous as Smallville turned out to be—his initial childhood meteor-shower introduction and subsequent car-crash return were perfectly representative—he’d been keeping himself out of harm’s way by judicious application of his superpower. With practice, he’d even learned to restart the clock while he was in something other than his original position relative to the rest of the Earth.
Furthermore, he’d painstakingly taught himself how to insert himself into a position of interest (in front of a secret LuthorCorp report on meteor rocks, for instance) and flicker into relative time and back out again, no more than an afterimage that caused someone’s head to snap up with an uneasy but completely unverifiable feeling of being observed. It wasn’t an ideal power, but it was a hell of a lot better than most of the alternatives, and Lex had spent a long time thinking about its highest and best uses.
Given how easy it was to incapacitate even the heartiest of meteor mutants when one had hours of subjective time to plan containment, he’d grown arrogant with success. He’d forgotten just how many ways there were to cause harm other than direct attack, and then he found himself married to a woman who tried to kill him. Freeze this, her pheremones told his ardor, and her pheromones won.
But always there was Clark, circling around him. Investigating, along with his little blonde friend. Clark, who somehow stopped Desiree before Lex had shaken off her spell long enough to dodge Jonathan Kent’s bullet.
Meteor rocks didn’t seem to grant the same power twice, though a certain ability to bounce up after getting hit seemed to be baseline, so Lex was thinking speed rather than its opposite for Clark’s power. He’d like to know more, but frankly he was so busy ferreting out his father’s secrets and keeping his own that he didn’t have time for a farmboy, however intriguing. Clark was young; he’d keep. (Lex sometimes wondered whether he was aging during these frozen moments. Whether he’d end up withered before his time, Dorian Grey in reverse. Nothing worked in the world unless he was touching it, so he wasn’t tempted to finish his abandoned dissertation experiments in the cracks between minutes. But there was a peace to be found in the world of statues. No matter how much contempt they showed him while they moved, they were all his to contemplate and control when he flexed his mutant power.)
He wanted to reward Clark for saving him from Desiree, but he knew by now that grand gestures would end badly with people like the Kents. So he wrote Clark a note, sincere and short, suggesting that any future help he could offer would be gladly given.
He hadn’t expected Clark to take him up on it so soon, though. Not a week later, he was getting his coffee at the Starbucks franchise Nell Potter had managed to start in the old theater when Clark appeared at his side. “Can I talk to you?” he asked.
Lex had spent many months trying to dodge Clark’s questions about what had happened on the bridge, and his extremely distracting lips and blushing cheeks and marble-worthy jawline. But he did owe Clark. Clark would have survived that scarecrow even if Lex hadn’t come along, but Clark had saved his life from Desiree’s murderous intentions. “Of course,” he said, and let Clark lead him off to the side.
They sat, and Lex busied himself with his coffee, only allowing himself surreptitious glances at Clark. Who had, impossibly, gotten more attractive in the past year, not to mention substantially closer to legal. No, Lex reminded himself, this would end badly even if he didn’t try to kill you like the rest of them.
Clark didn’t seem inclined to have the aforementioned talk, and Lex was content to sit and contemplate the thickness of his lashes—the boy could have walked a runway, it was appalling that he was stuck in the middle of nowhere—until Clark figured out his purpose.
“Chloe says you can teleport,” Clark finally said, blushing furiously.
Lex raised an eyebrow. That was a decent deduction, given her information. “I can’t,” he said, which had the unusual virtue of being the complete truth.
Clark was already nodding. “I told her … But you are one, right?”
“That’s a personal question, isn’t it?” It wasn’t as if Clark had admitted his own status in the few veiled conversations they’d had about the matter, even after Desiree.
“You—sometimes it’s like you’re there, and then you’re not, and then you’re back again. And it’s always when something happens.”
Lex would have to be more careful. If a couple of high-schoolers could figure it out, admittedly with some inside knowledge, then there was no telling who else could. (Father, he thought, and shuddered involuntarily.)
“I don’t know what to tell you, Clark,” and that too was the truth. “You know that being known as a meteor mutant is at least as dangerous as being one.”
It wasn’t an admission, but it was closer than he should have come. Clark had that effect on him, drugging, addictive. Desiree’s appeal was as artificial as saccharin by comparison.
“I can keep a secret, Lex,” Clark said, and reached across the table. His fingers brushed the back of Lex’s hand, hot and electric. “If you trust me, maybe I can help you.”
The very thought that a farmboy had help a Luthor needed was—but that was his father’s thought.
Clark’s eyes were a thousand different colors, Lex thought.
“Your mother is working for my father,” he said, forcing the words out. “Even inadvertently, there are things—”
“There are things I don’t tell my parents,” Clark said, leaning in. His hand covered Lex’s. This, Lex thought distantly, was a moment he wanted to freeze, but then he’d be alone. Suddenly it seemed tragic that he’d never get to show Clark the wonders of the time-locked world, bullets as firmly fixed in place as skyscrapers. “Lex—”
“Not here,” Lex managed, because people would be watching, and there was no way to stop gossip even for a man who could stop time. “Come by the mansion later.”
This was the worst idea in Lex’s truly extensive history of ill-considered impulses. But Lex had been in love, and it had been fake, and Clark had saved him.
Maybe that same strength could save him again.
for
arysteia: Clark's graduation and all Lex's feels He isn’t some old friend who can sneak in the back, unobserved. Even in Metropolis, someone would recognize him; here, the game is over before it starts, with the small consolation that no one’s going to be taking pictures of him surreptitiously and sending them to the gossip sites.
So his choices are to sail in proudly, as if he had any business being here (obsessed with a teenager, his father’s voice whispers), or to skip.
Or, none of the above: it’s trivial to have one of the school’s security cameras—paid for with a LuthorCorp grant, and given student mortality rates a decent investment—rerouted, so that he can watch with no one else any wiser.
Clark’s in the middle of the alphabet, the sole way in which he is no standout. Taller than all the rest, straight-shouldered and resplendent in his red gown with the wide yellow trim: Smallville’s finest product.
Lex has just been dealing with the dead body of a woman he knew reasonably well, and mostly respected. He’s just been handling Lana and her secrets. Yet his strongest emotion is for this event: just another thing that Clark Kent gets that a Luthor could never have (his graduation was attended by prime ministers, captains of industry, and two Oscar winners, but he was high in the vestry for most of the event) and that Clark wears with grace and even joy.
He’s not even jealous. Clark radiates his desert. Clark is in the sunlight; Lex is in darkness, staring at his computer as he waits for more information on the crystals. It seems appropriate. There are many uses for darkness, more perhaps than for light.
And, Lex has come to understand, Clark’s light shines more brightly in contrast. If Clark will allow him nothing else, Lex is willing to provide that.
... and for
avidrosette: Smallville, Clark/Lex, what if Clark's experience of pleasure had been as muffled as his experience of pain, leaving him desperate to feel? NC-17; Self-harm; BDSM elements.In Clark’s head, it went like this:
Lex ran his curled fist along the line of Clark’s cheek, a parody of a caress. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said. The Kryptonite of his ring scraped Clark’s skin, a line of agony, and Clark couldn’t even groan, flat on the ground and waiting for Lex’s next blow.
Lex pulled back, elegant even in his crouch, and examined Clark’s body like it was a sculpture he was considering buying. Clark closed his eyes and tried to gather his strength.
“… Wait,” Lex said, revelation lighting up his voice, and it wasn’t just nausea making Clark’s stomach tighten. “You like this.”
Back in his apartment, Clark gasped and came, his fingers so tight around himself that he would’ve turned coal into diamond. The Planet’s sex columnist advised male readers to try different approaches, loose grips and tight grips, short strokes and long ones, so they wouldn’t get to the point where sex with a partner was difficult. Clark was well beyond that point, and had been for a long time.
****
It wasn’t until a week after Lex Luthor had released him from the scarecrow that Clark could think about it without wanting to throw up. He’d never felt like that. Pain: how his mother felt when she burned her fingers on a dish hot from the oven, or Dad when he hammered his hand instead of the nail.
As the Smallville meteor freakshow accelerated, pain became a more regular visitor. Clark hated it, because it meant that people were in danger. He hated the way meteor mutants would throw him around when he was weak from exposure.
It took him a while to realize that he didn’t have a problem with the pain itself. At first he thought he’d kept Lana’s necklace, safe in its armored box, because he wanted something that had been close to Lana. He’d open the lid every few days, making sure it was still there, flinching at the wave of weakness that hit him as the meteor rock flared brilliantly green.
Eventually, he started opening it every night.
****
Like a priest, Clark had a vocation. He wouldn’t trade being Superman for human touches. He’d lost his powers before, and it had always, always ended badly. Since the very first time, he’d known that, and he hadn’t even been able to appreciate the ability to feel sensations, too busy thinking about how to get his powers back. Red Kryptonite provided the urge but not the capability; he’d ended up cutting himself with green Kryptonite he’d shaped into a knife.
When he’d lost the red K ring, he’d kept the knife.
And when Lois twisted and wriggled because the tag of her shirt was rubbing at her the wrong way, or when Jimmy yelped and swatted at the ant that was tickling his leg, Clark wanted.
****
He had it under control. Yes, he knew that plenty of self-injurers said that, but he was invulnerable and healed as soon as he shut his lead box, which meant he wasn’t taking the same kinds of risks. And he’d learned well that he had to let people make their own choices, even bad ones; why shouldn’t the same charity apply to him? He literally wasn’t hurting anyone else.
****
His tolerance was pretty high now. Mere exposure didn’t shake him up the way it used to, which had major benefits for those times that bad guys got their hands on Kryptonite—he was physically vulnerable, yes, but he could slog through that, and he borrowed technology from Bruce to harden his uniform for those situations.
Clark wasn’t going to pretend that was the reason he did it: he lied to enough people in his life. But he wasn’t going to deny the benefits of his … sensation-seeking, either.
****
When Lex did find out, the revelation was almost anticlimactic. Clark had made it his business not to be in the same room with Lex for the last few decades, except when a Superman-Luthor confrontation occurred by accident. (The one thing Superman knew that Clark hadn’t was that Lex didn’t react well to lectures; Superman had to teach his lessons through public exposure and private enforcement, neither of which required direct contact.)
Then Lex was elected, and there was a whole thing about the Justice League and sovereignty, lots of shouting and fearmongering, and somehow Lex managed to be the one to get them to Camp David to negotiate a modus operandi.
Of course Superman was at the center of the photo op, right by the President’s side. When Lex shook Clark’s hand for the cameras, he leaned in and said, “I’m sorry about earlier.”
Clark just managed to stop the un-Supermanlike “hunh?” that wanted to come out. Smallville earlier? Metropolis earlier? He raised one eyebrow instead—cool and collected. Pure Superman.
“I was stepping on your foot the entire time they were arranging the rest of the participants for the photo,” Lex said, smiling as the cameras clicked. “It was entirely unintentional, I assure you.”
“Oh,” Clark said. “Not a problem.”
“No, I suppose not,” Lex said. If Clark had looked, he probably could have seen Lex’s tricky, convoluted neurons firing.
And when Clark asked, Bruce provided the (highly illegally obtained, but what Clark couldn’t stop he could use) footage of Lex in the Oval Office, reviewing the footage of fight after fight, captured on cellphones and high-tech news cameras and everything in between, always focusing in on Clark.
****
So when the call came, routed untraceably through the Watchtower, Clark was pretty much expecting it.
“I won’t pretend we’re friends,” Lex said, and even now Clark felt a pang. If Lex knew—but Lex already knew too much. “But it seems to me that I can provide something that you want, and I very much want to give it to you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Clark said, weakly.
“Do you really want me to say it while Batman is listening?” Lex didn’t wait long for Clark’s non-answer. “You have my word that any deal we make will conform to your parameters.”
Lex could well be telling the truth. The pure satisfaction of beating Superman up might suffice for him.
Someone else—Lex—touching him, making him feel it. Not in danger, not real, but real enough.
“I’ll come to the White House,” Clark said. (And rip out Bruce’s cameras while he was at it, despite the paranoiac fit Bruce was going to throw.)
****
“You’ll need a safe word,” Lex said, standing in his terrifying, lead-lined lab buried underneath the White House. Some presidents installed bowling alleys; Lex picked state-of-the-art centrifuges. He was turned away from Clark, inspecting his domain. He sounded bored, except that Clark had known Lex far longer than Lex imagined.
“Lex,” he said without thinking, and Lex turned in an instant, his eyes widening. If Clark could have felt anything, he would have felt the weight of that gaze. Clark swallowed. “That’s my safe word.”
Lex’s jaw clenched. “Very well,” he said. “Take your clothes off and get on the table.”
It was shiny silver, clinical: everything Clark had ever feared from Lex. Level 3, but run by the most powerful man on Earth.
Clark was shaking as he undressed, leaving his uniform in a puddle on the slick white floor. Lex’s eyes on him were unflinching, though Lex didn’t order him to face forward, maybe because it was just as disconcerting to have Lex at his back.
The table would’ve been cold, for a human. Clark sat on the edge, nervously curling his fingers around and struggling not to crush the metal between them. He hadn’t had this much trouble controlling his strength in years.
“Lie down,” Lex said, gentle in victory.
This was the stupidest thing Clark had ever done, and his career of dumb impulse decisions was storied.
Clark closed his eyes. Shortly thereafter, he felt the shock of Kryptonite roll over him.
If Lex cut deep, he’d make Lex stop. He shouldn’t trust Lex to stop.
He did trust Lex to stop. After all, Clark’s surrender—Superman’s surrender—was a victory all its own. The power to stop was a huge one.
“Shh,” Lex said, almost dreamily. He hadn’t realized he’d been making noise.
“You look …” Lex said, and uncharacteristically trailed off. Clark knew he was unattractive like this, veins bulging and making his alienness undeniable. If the rest of the world saw this, he’d lose many of his supporters even without the part where he was getting Lex Luthor to hurt him in the service of his own sexual pleasure.
Lex’s hand on his stomach was such a shock that he almost convulsed, clenching his fists and opening his eyes. Lex was barely touching him. Maybe not even touching, just holding his fingers close enough that Clark could feel their heat.
Clark blinked up at him, confused. Lex wasn’t even holding a scalpel. His fists weren’t clenched, ready to pummel Clark into a momentary mass of bruises.
There were storms in his eyes like the storms Clark sometimes watched from orbit.
“You’re going to want to hang on,” Lex advised, and then leaned over to take the head of Clark’s dick in his mouth.
Clark had been hit by lightning before. This was nothing like that. The pleasure seemed to start in his spine and roll out in huge waves, arching his spine and blasting through every nerve.
He came before Lex had gotten halfway down the length of his dick, and Lex choked for a second but swallowed, cheeks working as he stared up at Clark across the span of Clark’s body. It seemed to last forever, and when it was over, Clark was boneless on the table, staring up at the bright lights of the lab ceiling and wondering if he was ever going to be able to move again.
There was a rustle as Lex pulled away—he hadn’t even loosened his tie—and Clark felt the familiar ebb as the Kryptonite’s effect disappeared.
What the—?
Dazedly, he pushed himself back up to a seated position. Lex was putting his lead-lined box back into some sort of safe, tapping in a code. There were probably other things in that safe that Clark needed to know about for his day job. He couldn’t have cared about that to save his life.
“L—Mr. President?”
Lex turned to him, raising one fine eyebrow. “I trust that was satisfactory.”
That was one word for it. “Uh, should I—” Lex’s pants were tented, obscene. Clark wanted to open the Kryptonite box again, touch him, spend an hour learning the shape of every muscle.
Lex glanced down at himself and grimaced dismissively. “I’m sure you have other business. One of the Secret Service can show you out.”
And before Clark could begin to formulate a response, much less a question, he was gone.
Clark sat there, mind all but blank, for some time. As various kinds of intelligence came back online, he realized that he was so far out of his depth that he might have been at the heart of the sun.
But Lex—
Lex wanted him.
He didn’t know what that meant. Maybe they couldn’t ever be allies, much less friends like they’d been when he was only Clark and Lex was only Lex. But now he knew a lot more than Lex had, probably, wanted to reveal.
Before he left, he supersped into the Oval Office, where Lex was alone, reading reports.
“Next time,” he said, and Lex’s head snapped up, “I want you to use a knife first.”
The look of total surprise on Lex’s face was worth all the stomach-clenching fear he felt if he tried to think about the larger picture. Clark had learned over the years how to take risks—and Lex had told him that he could have this on his terms.
He planned to see just how serious Lex was about that.
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I also liked the role reversal, with Clark as the pursuer both of the truth and of Lex's trust. The opening Lex offers Clark for that, the simple switch from "grand gestures" to " a note, sincere and short" was a wonderful touch - so basic and obvious, but so impossible for canon Lex to conceive that it reads as deadpan humor here.
#2: Loved the contrast between Clark in the sunlight, "resplendent in his red gown with the wide yellow trim," and Lex in the dark, watching the spectacle at the remove of a dim screen. I like that you make Lex self-aware of the contrast and have him weave it into a personal narrative, the Stuff of Legends according to Lex. The way that we read this (at the remove of our own dim screens) against a context of other stories where Lex does "sail in proudly" adds another interesting layer to the experience of this story.
#3: Eeeeee, I loved this.
Like a priest, Clark had a vocation. He wouldn't trade being Superman for human touches.
Love this - this sense of willing but genuine sacrifice in the service of a deeply felt calling. Beautiful compression in the way you express it.
Clark had made it his business not to be in the same room with Lex for the last few decades, except when a Superman-Luthor confrontation occurred by accident.
What a feeling of emptiness and denial this simple statement conveys. He doesn't even allow himself the outlet of the occasional confrontation with Lex. Yet like the priest line, Clark is matter-of-fact about it, not permitting any self-pity.
Clark just managed to stop the un-Supermanlike "hunh?" that wanted to come out. Smallville earlier? Metropolis earlier? He raised one eyebrow instead - cool and collected. Pure Superman.
He's so locked down, a prisoner inside his professional self. Gorgeous the way you show how his iron boundaries have a two-way effect - making him impervious to physical sensation from without and creating an inescapable cage for emotional sensation from within.
And when Clark asked, Bruce provided the (highly illegally obtained, but what Clark couldn’t stop he could use) footage of Lex in the Oval Office, reviewing the footage of fight after fight, captured on cellphones and high-tech news cameras and everything in between, always focusing in on Clark.
Love these layers of voyeurism - Clark watching Lex watching Clark
If Lex knew—but Lex already knew too much.
Clark won't even permit himself to complete the thought. He is silenced even internally.
“But it seems to me that I can provide something that you want, and I very much want to give it to you.”
I love the way Clark assumes that Lex wants to hurt him. And yet in the incredibly hot and emotionally intense scene in the basement lab, we learn that Lex wants to pleasure him. In the end, Lex barely does anything to him, but just being in Lex's presence with the intention of letting down his defenses is almost enough to undo him.
If Lex cut deep, he’d make Lex stop. He shouldn’t trust Lex to stop.
He did trust Lex to stop.
Before Lex even lays a hand on him, this act of trust is letting Clark feel things. I love the way the language is suddenly filled with sensation words - "terrifying," " the weight of that gaze," "cold," feared," - and physical and emotional reactions - "Clark swallowed," "Clark was shaking."
Lex’s hand on his stomach was such a shock that he almost convulsed, clenching his fists and opening his eyes.
This touch is barely even sexual and yet it's scorching in the context you've created of Clark's physical and emotional barrenness.
This story was masterful. I love the way you show that once Clark is freed from his cage, with sensation able to enter and emotion to flow outward, he is also able to actively seek out the connection to Lex. I love the suggestion that in the future of this fic, Clark may be able to return the favor and release Lex from his own self-imposed bonds.
What an intense and moving fic, so beautifully written and with so much going on psychologically that I feel like I've barely scratched the surface here. Wow!
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