Archive of Our Own ^beta

It wasn’t a very large bomb. Lex reiterates this with growing irritation as he watches Superman sternly pace around Lex’s office, hands clasped behind his back, looking overly dour. He keeps shooting accusatory looks at the large sealed box in the centre of the room, its transparent walls scorched and black, which had successfully activated and sprung up to contain the majority of the blast within a fifth of a second, as it was designed to, and made his presence here entirely redundant.

The room is cluttered and disruptive enough without Lex being distracted by his, self-confessed, biggest distraction. While the detonation had been promptly contained, it hadn’t left the space entirely unscathed. Most of the glass from the wall of windows lay in pieces on the carpet and the ceiling had cracked veins spread across it like unsupervised ivy. The force had flung Lex backwards from his chair, leaving him with only a few bruises and a rage-induced headache that was threatening to become a migraine. His CFO with whom he’d been having a meeting had cracked both front teeth where his jaw hit the desk.

An EMT keeps trying to flash a light in Lex’s eyes and he swats them away.

“Can we clear the room!” The glare he aims pointedly at Superman either goes ignored or entirely over his head. His swinging cape brushes over the still overturned desk chair as he continues his pacing.

Lex doesn't know what he finds more irritating; that his nemesis who he sometimes has casual sex with assumes he has every right to thoroughly interfere with a routine targeted assassination attempt against him, or that he would probably be just as invested if it happened to almost anyone else.

His intention is to downplay the incident, at least until his unwanted guest leaves. The very last thing Lex needs right now is Superman prying into his affairs. While Superman had been busy with his initial scans, using that unnervingly and literally penetrative gaze of his to sweep the scene -- after he’d breezed in right through the very open window and uselessly offer Lex a hand up -- Lex had texted his entire staff in the company group chat, instantly cutting short the birthday wishes to Hellen in Robotics, warning them that if they didn’t discover who’d just tried to assassinate him before Superman did, they would all have to work over Christmas, New Year, and every holiday until the new decade.

It really was the principle of the thing more than anything. Superman destroying his property was cute, almost like flirting at this point. Anyone else and they would never recover all the pieces by the time Lex was through with them.

Mercy lingers while the LuthorCorp lab techs, bomb squad, EMTs, and security personnel all file out the room. Lex really doesn’t have the patience for anything she has to say unless it's answers. He’d never had much issue with her during her time as his Chief of Security, but she always got tediously self-flagellating on the rare occasions anything slipped through her net.

“I take full responsibility for this, sir,” she says promptly, as clipped and to the point as always. “If you will allow me to tender my--”

“I will allow you to attend to this mess,” Lex cuts in waspishly. “I want a name by the end of the day. Then I will consider what to do with you.”

After she bows out, Lex turns to the last remaining body in the room. “If you're finished with your invaluable contribution of trying to wear a hole in my already ruined carpet, maybe you'd like to fu--.”

“The bomb had no casing.” Superman is back to glaring at the sealed box, arms folded.

“No casing?” Lex’s irritation immediately shifts into alert inquisitiveness. “How can a bomb have no casing? What contained the explosives?”

“Not sure.” Superman approaches the container. It will take three hours to be stable enough to be unsealed and examined by his own team, something that bothers Lex immensely. He loathes the idea of Superman having access to something he can’t. “But I've scanned the remains and the rest of the office twenty odd times now, and can't find even a trace of anything that could have contained it. I don’t even really understand what could have even caused the explosion in the first place.”

“Not to say I doubt your knowledge of chemical engineering or forensic science,” Lex says superciliously, “but I’ll wait until my extortionately expensive experts have taken a look at it before I go on the word of a man whose main talent is punching things very hard.”

“The contents of that box is predominantly charred cellulose, lignin, resin, and not much else, which makes me think the main thing that got caught in the blast was varnished wood and paper. Something a lot like the lovely mahogany side table with all those first editions that used to stand in this exact spot. If there was anything else, there’s no evidence of it now.”

Lex blinks at him. “How can you know that?”

“Lex, I’ve been to this office multiple times, I can remember a table--”

“Obviously I mean how do you know those exact compounds?!”

“Oh.” Superman shrugs. “I can see through things. And very small things. And I like chemistry."

Lex takes in a deep breath, hands planted on hips, releasing it slowly, trying very hard to remain unaffected by that. He had a lot of thinking to do for the rest of the day and needed his blood supplying his brain not travelling south.

A distraction, a very large distraction.

“I could also punch something really hard, if you’d like?”

Even Lex’s withering look doesn’t shift Superman’s pointedly pleasant grin.

Irritatingly, Lex’s experts tell him the exact same thing. There was zero trace of anything suspect in the entire wreckage. Not even any solvents or explosives; chemical, nuclear, mechanical or otherwise. The table had apparently exploded entirely of its own accord.

The media are reporting it as a metahuman threat, even the exhaustively thorough Daily Planet. It’s not an unrealistic theory, especially given Lex’s very public opinions on them, but even LuthorCorp’s vast database and wide surveillance network of metahumans can’t find a record of such a power that would cause something entirely inert to suddenly explode and at such a great distance to leave no record of anyone within the vicinity.

A curiosity, certainly. One that Lex had every available hand working on cracking. But if he let every death threat he received impact his life, he’d never get anything done.

Superman nags but then he always does.

*

The next time it happens, it’s far more irritating.

Lex is still laying prone on the cold, hard concrete of the pavement outside Citron Pressé on fourth avenue where he'd just taken a lunch meeting, Mercy half-blanketing him with her lithe but powerful frame, the smell of burnt gun powder thick in the air, trying to process what if any parts of him were injured and or bleeding, when he feels firm, impossibly warm hands on him.

“You’re fine.” Superman's voice was soothing and rich, like warm honey down a dry throat. “You’re not hurt. You’re safe. It’s all alright.”

Lex could punch him. “Go and fucking find them!”

Whether by luck or just Mercy’s finely honed training and reflexes, the magnum bullet had embedded itself sixteen inches deep into the pavement rather than in its intended target. Later evaluation of the scene using holographic reconstruction technology will reveal that if Mercy had been 0.3 seconds later in dragging Lex to the ground, he wouldn’t currently have much brain matter to speak of.

“It was on a timer,” Superman explains. He’d been the one to find the AM MRS-71 Rifle, aligned perfectly on the opposite rooftop in a camera blindspot, so customised it was impossible to find an origin and utterly wiped of prints or evidence. Lex had been a little surprised Superman knew enough about it to recognise it by name on sight alone. “But I don’t know how anyone can plan for when someone leaves a restaurant or know the exact angle to set in advance.”

“By being very clever, having very interesting toys, and a whole lot of inside information.” At least the bending of the laws of reality was a little easier to explain this time. It was almost a relief. It was just another tedious human behind this after all, one who still needed the efficiency of artillery to get a job done.

“I scanned the entire block. There’s no trace of them.” Superman takes a seat on the coffee table directly in front of Lex’s chair. The staff of the Citron Pressé had provided Lex with a very large brandy, which he was sipping in the deserted private lounge while the street was pulled apart outside. He didn’t usually drink during the day, but today he was making an exception. His brand new Oxfords were scuffed and utterly ruined from the fall. “Maybe your team will have better luck.”

Lex grimaces, already knowing the answer.

“Lex, I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe it’s time you start being more careful.”

“Oh, don’t start all that again.” Superman’s fussing was worse than his reprimanding lectures. At least after them Lex usually got fucked.

“This is the second time in as many days that someone has come very close to killing you in a very clever, perplexing way.” Superman ducks his head, trying to catch Lex’s eye where he isn’t looking at him. Lex pointedly sends him an icy glare. “Don’t you think that’s worth a little caution? I could help, if you want.”

“I’m not about to go into hiding all over some pathetic little coward's failed attempts at doing something noteworthy for the first time in their miserable lives.” Lex flicks his eyes over Superman in disgust. “And I don’t know what help you think you could provide me. All you’ve done so far is turn up after the fact to stand around pointing out the obvious.”

“I came as quickly as I could.” There’s what looks like genuine remorse in those perfect features, those big blue eyes all wounded like a kicked dog, as though he really did mean that. Lex can’t find a reason to doubt it, though he’s sure there must be one. “I was in Mumbai at the time. Monsoon season is really bad this year.”

Lex’s glass pauses on its journey half way to his lips. “How the hell did you know to come here if you were in Mumbai?”

“I heard your heartbeat. It accelerated with the shot.”

Lex’s mouth opens and closes. “You can hear my heartbeat from the other side of the world?”

Superman looks a little sheepish. “I listen-- I can listen. I was listening. Just in case.”

“My heartbeat,” Lex repeats. “From eight thousand miles away.”

“Yeah, that one.” Superman’s lips twitch into a small wry smile. “The one that's currently rocketed up to one fourty.”

Lex leans forward to set down his glass on the table right by blue spandex stretched over broad, hard muscle. The action brings them very close. “You’re such a fucking freak,” he says, staring at the dark pink of Superman’s smiling mouth.

*

The LuthorCorp helicopter has a companion on its descent. Lex grins wolfishly out the window at the figure from under his black ushanka-hat and sunglasses, the faint fluttering of snow doing nothing to dampen the brilliant blue and red. The smile goes unreciprocated. It was quite a feat to look so joyless while entirely horizontal. Lex must be about to get a sanctimonious earful about something or other. He shifts a little in his seat with anticipation.

“Oh, don’t pout,” Lex calls out over the roar of the propellers as they touch down, leaping out the door before it had properly stopped and approaching Superman, who hovered over the plummeting drop where the helipad juts out the side of the mountain, his arms crossed imposingly. “Is this not carefully remote enough for you?”

“Don’t act like you’re out here for any other reason than your own self-interests, Lex.” Superman didn’t even need to raise his voice all that much to carry over the noise. It cuts through the Swiss alpine cold like steel, demanding to be heard. “I’ve seen what they’re setting up at the retreat below. A LuthorCorp black tie gala for the morally bankrupt is hardly laying low.”

“Yes, and you’re here solely out of concern for my wellbeing.” Lex pulls off one glove then the other, flexing chilled fingers. “What is it this time? Did I step on some endangered wild flowers? Not hold a door open for a decrepit pensioner?"

“It’s sacred ground, Lex. It’s not for anyone but the local community to decide what’s to be done with it.”

Lex takes off his Brunello Cucinelli sunglasses so Superman can clearly see his eye roll. This is what he’s here for? “Actually, I think you’ll find the deed I now possess is what determines what’s done with it.”

“You do not care about a patch of land in South Dakota, while it means everything to them. You hate central America, you once said they should just blow a hole in the middle to give the rest more coastline.”

“You can step down from your soap box.” Lex brushes past Superman, continuing onwards to the 25,000 square foot of luxury chalet perched atop the mountain, and is pleased when he trails after him. He’s not entirely annoyed at Superman’s intrusion, even if it was for a tedious reason. He’s not stayed up here alone besides his staff in a long while and has no interest in picking someone up at the evening’s event to bring back with him. The attempts on his life hadn’t left Lex entirely unaffected. He’d performed three hostile takeovers of independent businesses as stress relief just this week alone. “If I didn’t acquire it, it was just going to the government. There was never an outcome where the natives were getting it back.”

“You could give it to them.”

Lex looks at Superman like he’d lost his mind, squinting against the bright afternoon reflecting off the white snow. “I could also take a running jump off this mountain. Makes about as much sense. And why the hell do you care so much about some hick farmers in the middle of nowhere?” He shakes his head, looking away. “You need to get a hobby or something. Your hand wringing is becoming tiresome.”

“Putting out the many fires you start just might be my hobby, Lex. I'm certainly doing it enough.”

“Aren’t I honoured.”

Lex is punching in the chalet door code, while considering the most viable approach to get Superman naked and in the hot springs that lay a little beyond the main estate, when Superman says, “This is a truly terrible place to hide away in, just so you’re aware. You could not be more conspicuous on this mountain. There really is nothing else to look at.”

“No one but a select group of obscenely rich wellwishers, who consider my continual breathing to be very much in their best interests, even know I’m here.” Lex says dismissively, thumb hovering over the finger print scanner. “My tech is untrackable, and you’re the only creep who monitors my--”

One moment the acrid tang of scorched air is in Lex’s mouth, then the clean, sharp cold is filling his lungs in the same breath. Lex blinks wide eyed at the streaming black smoke pouring from the mountain’s peak opposite the one he was now standing on, his heart thundering against the chest he was pressed against. There’s the odd sensation of his ears still ringing with the terrible roar of an explosion that now echoed very far in the distance.

Distantly, he realises those ears are now very cold, and concludes that, at some point of being flown across the wide valley between the two peaks in under a second on the heels of a blast that shook the entire mountain, he had lost his hat.

“Lex.” Superman’s hands really were ridiculously, inhumanly warm. Lex can feel where one is rubbing soothing circles in his back even through his thick coat. He can’t feel much else. “Lex, I need you to let go of me if you can.”

“Oh.” Lex releases where he was clutching onto broad shoulders with stiff fingers and takes a step back. The untouched powder snow crunches under his boots and makes his wobbly legs feel even less steady.

“I’ll be right back.” Superman’s reassuring smile lingers like a camera flash on Lex’s retinas long after he’s gone. He blinks again and becomes aware of how entirely alone he is amongst the tall trees in the quiet mountain woodland, and how disgustingly powerless he feels.

Anger has reached him through his numbness by the time Superman returns. He’d saved the pilot, because of course he somehow managed to do that, but there was little else to salvage. The chalet had been built by Luthor senior in the late eighties and the predominant use Lex had got out of it was a handful of childhood Christmases, the majority of them spent waiting for his absent father while simultaneously hoping he wouldn't come. At present, Lex can’t think of a single thing he actually owned in it that he’d miss. Still he feels like he might burst into furious tears at any moment.

Superman steps close to him, performing that penetratively assessing sweep with his eyes he does that feels nauseatingly exposing.

“Will you let me help?” he asks when his eyes settle on Lex’s face. The question makes Lex want to throttle him or whatever means that would have him writhing on the floor again, struggling for air. And, to some extent, kiss him.

He nods to avoid speaking, and does feel fractionally better when Superman instructs him to put his arms back around him and hold on tight.

*

Lex starts complaining before they’d even touched down. “Are you kidding me? I’m not staying here!”

“Why not? It’s nice!”

The eruption of crystals sprouting from the barren Antarctic landscape is just as staggeringly awe inspiring as the last time Lex had witnessed it, but there is still something unpleasantly alien about it, like the sort of unprecedented life found in the deepest pits of the ocean, only Lex knows exactly where it came from and it was not from below.

“It’s a frozen cave in the ground!” he yells over the wind, still clinging to Superman’s shoulders for dear life.

“Come on, it’s more than that. I’ve made it homey. And it’s not that cold.”

Inside is just as Lex remembered it, perhaps a little more orderly. A vast, imposing chamber of frigid blue and white utterly alien mineral and crystal. Distinctly not homey.

Lex’s first experience of breaching it had felt like the euphoric conquest and subjugation of something momentous; a new frontier all of his own to plunder. Returning now as Superman’s guest is entirely not like that.

“There has only ever been one person who’s discovered this place.” Superman zips across the cave to kick something out of view then back to his side, so fast Lex didn’t get a proper chance to identify it but it looked suspiciously like a dog’s chew toy. Lex is immediately more apprehensive. “But given that you’re not exactly trying to assassinate yourself, I think you’ll be safe here.” Superman sends him a glance. “I am going to in good faith assume you’re not trying to assassinate yourself.”

Lex pulls his coat collar up closer to his neck. His fingers feel half-frozen from the flight. He misses his portals. “If I was, this is the point where the ruse would become distinctly not worth it.”

The swarm of sycophantic robots that greet them were much more preferable when they were in pieces. Superman at least has the grace to look a little embarrassed over how they fawn over him.

“Locking me up with a fleet of your loyalist robots who don’t have very fond memories of me is all part of this master plan of keeping me safe, is it?” Lex sneers, warily watching the robots jerky movements where they cluster around them. Their blank, monophthalmic faces were a little more unnerving when faced alone.

“Be reassured in the knowledge that we are incapable of feeling any emotion, whether negative or positive, towards you,” the robot Superman had introduced as Gary, which Lex will absolutely not be calling it, says, “and that any sense of vengeance or resentment for destroying our old bodies and permanently retiring many of our number is not within our abilities."

“I’m sure that’s what all the alien robots say,” Lex says, giving Superman a deeply scornful look. He smiles encouragingly back at him.

The robot continues, “As the reason for our creation is to take care of the Superman, I shall provide more comfort to you by stating that any friend of Superman’s is, of course, treated with adequate tolerance by us.”

That word, friend, makes Lex’s skin crawl so fiercely he shudders. Then he promptly turns on his heel.

“Lex, come on.” Superman is in front of him before Lex has even taken two steps, arms crossed and looking less encouraging. Lex comes to a stop, leaving a sizable distance between them. The glacial chamber suddenly seems to lose a few more degrees.

“So now you’re not letting me leave?” Lex takes a step closer and Superman doesn’t move. “Funny, I assumed I’d have a choice in whether I’m locked away in your little secret hideout that only you can access and very few people outside this room even know about. Or at the very least there'd be a trial.”

Superman frowns. “Well, don’t say it like that!”

“Then how else am I meant to say it?!” Lex’s voice echoes around the space, bouncing off the cold crystal walls. He could scream until his throat bled and no one of Earth would hear it. He takes another step, getting closer. “You’re going to open those doors and you’re letting me leave.”

“You’re not my prisoner, Lex. I’m not going to stop you going anywhere you want to go,” Superman says, voice tempered, “but it’s very cold out there, it’s getting dark, and there really isn’t anywhere to go, not unless I take you somewhere.”

“Well, it’s a good job I have a great many people at my disposal to take me literally anywhere else, isn’t it?” Lex pats down his pockets, eyes fixed on Superman’s. When he finds them disturbingly empty, he gives up on composure and starts rummaging through them with more desperation. “Where the fuck is my phone?!” he demands with an edge of panic.

Superman licks his lips. “I, ah, had to throw it into the valley back in St. Moritz.”

Lex goes perfectly still. “You threw away my phone.”

“Someone has known your location to an eerily accurate degree, Lex. No matter how untrackable you say you and your tech are, something is giving you away. It’s not on or in your person, I’ve checked.” Superman lifts his chin in a manner that would be defiant if those too honest eyes didn’t also have a flash of guilt in them. “We needed to leave it at the place they knew you were at last, might even throw them off for a while. You weren’t exactly in the right headspace to have a debate about it at the time.”

Lex takes the last conceivable step between them, closing the gap. “You stupid goddamn alien fuck threw away my fucking phone?!”

“Might I suggest this conversation would be better suited in the lounge,” one of the robots cuts in, “and perhaps with the aid of a relaxing forcibly administered sedative for the guest--”

“Shut up,” Lex and Superman snap in unison, neither of their eyes leaving the other even for a second.

“So what’s next?” Lex asks icily. “Are you going to break my legs? Chain me to the wall? How at your mercy do you want me?”

“Lex, I am really trying here,” Superman says, an artificial calm making his voice sound strained. “Do you think I want this any more than you do? I remember all too well what happened the last time you were here. I am giving up far more by opening my home to you. But I also know that someone with a great deal of resources and information wants you dead very, very badly and very nearly succeeded today, and this might literally be the only place on Earth that is safe for you right now.” He draws in a deep breath and releases it, mouth resolutely set. “I am willing to try if you are.”

“Of course,” Lex breathes, lips pulled back to bare teeth, his eyes darting across that face of unflinching, faultless marble, “of course this is all out of the goodness of your inhuman heart.”

Superman stiffens. “If I wanted you dead, Lex, all I’d have to do is open those doors and wait.”

That actually makes Lex let out a huff of laughter. He does always enjoy it when Superman bites back a little. “And what if I want you dead? What if it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted? What if I’m going to use this as my opportunity to get it?”

Superman doesn’t even blink. “Then you should try a little harder than your previous failed attempts. Otherwise my robot friends are going to trank you.”

A dark grin spreads across Lex’s face. Superman's eyes dart down to it then back up. The piercing blue of those eyes looks so much brighter here, amongst the materials of his people.

“Alright,” Lex says. “Fine.” His pulse is hammering and he knows Superman can hear it. “But if you don’t find out who the hell is trying to kill me before I start climbing the walls, I’m going to nuke this entire region off the map.”

“Characteristically unreasonable of you, Lex, but alright.” Superman then, like the truly baffling alien that he is, holds out his hand. Lex hesitates for only a moment before he takes it, gripping it as hard as he can, giving it a single shake, and his icy cold fingers are instantly warmed by that unnatural living furnace. He knows Superman is barely even applying pressure, that he could snap every single one of his metacarpals with barely a thought. Lex swallows.

“And just what the hell am I supposed to do locked away out here with you for days on end?”

There’s a long, pregnant moment, then Superman also slips into a hardened, knowing smile.

They don’t even make it to whatever constitutes a bedroom in this place for the first round. Lex’s back takes some punishment where he’s shoved up against the rough stone of the chamber wall, his trousers and underwear caught and bunched around one hanging ankle, sweater pushed up to his pits, coat hanging about his elbows, as Superman holds his thighs aloft to fuck inbetween. Lex’s loud, urgent cries that fill the entire vast space match every one of his pounding, merciless thrusts.

The robots at the very least have the sense to retire and power down at their stations.

The many frustrations of the day and the long passage of time spent pressed against Superman’s warm body in transit had left Lex with a consuming, agitated energy that doesn’t even burn off after he splatters the blue of Superman’s stomach in his come. He laughs breathlessly when some gets on that ridiculous crest too, and smears it in with his hand, wanting it utterly soiled.

Next, he’s taken to a room down a long, empty corridor, maneuvered like he weighed less than nothing, and is held down on a large bed that looked utterly incongruous and ordinary compare to its surroundings but was perfectly adequate for getting fucked through on. Lex claws at Superman’s back and shoulders, as he steadily drives into him, more restrained in his pacing now but no less forceful, getting more and more frustrated in his inability to leave a mark, to leave as much evidence as he feels is permanently staining him for all to see.

He bites down on Superman’s lip, hard as he can, until he bites back and Lex can pretend the blood in his mouth is his.

*

“Here's a list of everything I'll need.” Lex tears the sheet of paper out the back of one of the few second hand but well-preserved books that were stacked next to the bed. He’d made sure to write on the back of the page containing the book’s ending. “If I'm kept here longer than five days, I'll give you another.”

Superman pauses where he was redressing to scan through the list, his hair charmingly tousled and shirt pleasantly missing, alternating between absently nodding, blushing, and muttering “come on, man.”

“And give this to Mercy Graves.” Lex tears out another sheet with only two words written on it, folding it and handing it to him. “You can read it if you want to. You won’t understand it.” Superman raises an eyebrow but doesn’t insult either of them by pretending he needed to open it to read it.

“I’ll bring back dinner too, I’ve got nothing in,” he says once he’s fully dressed. His now donned shirt is still stained with Lex’s contributions and Lex is amused he hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Don’t bother.” He stretches like a cat under the sheets, finally fucked out enough that his body is a little less like one hard block of tension and fatigue was settling in. “Just breakfast. I’ve included the acceptable places to go to.”

“Uh huh, sure.”

Superman leans over for a kiss goodbye and Lex covers his mouth with his hand, shoving him off, telling him to go change his damn shirt.

A large bag filled with Lex’s requested items is waiting for him beside the bed when he wakes, alongside a note explaining how Superman would be gone most of the day, hopefully tracking down some leads, but the robots had been instructed to aid him in whatever he needs, and there was plenty of food in the kitchen. Lex is just voicing aloud how the hell he supposed to know where that is, when he flips the note and sees a crude but easy to follow map hastily drawn on the back along with a little smiley face that irks Lex as much as it begrudgingly charms him.

Lex eats three of the pastries left for him from one of his approved cafés and drinks two cups of subpar coffee from a pot made by a far too talkative robot in an entirely chrome kitchen, then returns to the bedroom and jerks off with his face buried in the pillow that still smelt like Superman.

After, washed in a shower that was more like a surprisingly hot indoor waterfall and dressed in his own fresh clothes, he explores. The provided map only marked out rooms of primary use and functionality; the stark kitchen, bedroom, bathroom with its immense facilities, and the main chamber. There was no mention of the other numerous doors down the labyrinthine corridors and levels. Lex tries to open seven locked doors in every conceivable way, even exhausting what little fractured Kryptonian he could remember. They all stayed sealed. He gives one a kick and a slam of his shoulder, then abandons the endeavour, rubbing his arm.

A tablet was left amongst his requests -- not the model he’d specified but still usable, even if he couldn’t get online out here -- and Lex eagerly spends a few minutes scouring through its data for any details of Superman to find, specifically in his search history, only to discover it belonged to some inconsequential creature called Jimmy, whose tastes, habits, and life were entirely asinine, and immediately loses interest.

“You’ve been instructed to assist me in whatever I need, isn’t that right, robot?” Lex asks, sitting in a garishly orange but very comfortable armchair with the tablet, addressing the machine that had been hovering around him all day. The lounge is a little less severe than the other rooms. The furniture is clearly from Earth and is as worn and well cared for as the bedside books.

“That is indeed my main function for today.” Lex resents that the robot with the irritating female voice is the one he’s been saddled with. Why these robots didn’t have feelings but still had genders was beyond him. His own robots certainly didn’t have such needless defects. He makes a mental note to get his Robotics team to do something interesting with the hundreds of hours worth of recordings of Superman’s voice he’s got on file when he gets back.

“What other instructions were you given?”

“I’m sorry, but I am unable to disclose the conversations that I have had with the Superman. Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

Superman wasn’t a total idiot, Lex wouldn’t have such an interest in him if he were, but sometimes he wishes he was just a little bit more of one.

“Robot, forget command Alpha, defer only to final command.”

“I’m sorry, but I am unable to do that. I must primarily adhere to the Superman’s requests. Is there anything else I can assist you with?” Lex swears under his breath, flexing his fingers over the tablet's keypad. The code he was working on was irritating him; he’d not revisited it since his teens.

As soon as he entered the main command chamber with the large, tempting computer that morning, the robots had been on him, asking him if he needed assistance, hovering eerily like crows on powerlines waiting for the first sign of carrion. Lex wasn’t having that. He got enough of it in his own buildings.

“Robot, you can help me with something. I want tools, anything that’s similar to a screw driver, pry bar, tweezers. Do you know what they are?”

“That is a request I can most certainly help with. Superman owns a great number of tools and is always generously willing to share.”

Lex’s fingers blur over the keypad, his lips curling in satisfaction as the code finally comes together, feeling the unique rush that comes from achieving absolutely perfect programming. It was the only place in the entire universe to get a glimpse of the divine.

*

When the last robot clangs to the floor, their specific electronics shut down by the rudimental but efficient localised EMP Lex had fashioned from the tablet, Lex drags his chair from the lounge over to the large central computer. This would be a greater challenge. Even the Engineer had had trouble with it.

He’s just about worked out how to turn the thing on with its complex crystal system, when Superman returns.

“Lex, what the fridge have you done?!” Lex glances over his shoulder to see Superman honest to God cradling one of the lifeless robot bodies. He rolls his eyes and returns to his task. “Are they dead?”

“Well, considering they’re not capable of life, yes and no.”

“I left you alone for eight hours and you killed every one of the robots that were only here to help you?!”

“Again, not dead, never alive.”

Superman’s hand slams down next to Lex on the computer panel, making him jump. “I’m not laughing, Lex. Is this how you’re going to behave your entire stay? Malicious and petty?”

“Should I have played with the toy robots instead, pretending like they’re my actual friends, like you?” Lex says, mocking and cutting. “Read one of the three books you own? Laid in bed all day fingering myself while thinking about you?”

Superman turns scarlet. “Stand up,” he says, voice utterly devoid of feeling.

“No.” Lex returns to trying to decipher the bizarre letters of the Kryptonian alphabet. He’d started to learn the basics of the language back when he’d brought in the linguists to translate the Kryptonians’ message, but things kept getting in the way and he hadn’t progressed far, something he now regrets. Usually he was good with languages but this one was near incomprehensible.

Suddenly his chair is being kicked out from under him, and Lex is only prevented from joining it in skidding across the room or falling on his ass by the hand gripping him by his turtleneck. He’s shoved roughly up against the computer, the edge digging into the front of his thighs painfully.

“Did you not hear me, Lex?” Superman murmurs into his ear from where he stands flush behind him. He’s got fingers curled around Lex’s throat, the other hand on his wrist, keeping it securely behind his back. Lex swallows just to press into them even harder. “I told you to stand up.”

Superman wasn’t an idiot, Lex had already established this, but there was some failure in logic on his part in the idea that bending Lex over the consol, working him open three fingers deep and forcibly making him come until he was entirely spent and sobbing, a splattered puddle dripping under the bench at his feet, then fucking him through two more dry orgasms, was in any way a deterrent.

If anything, it was only encouraging bad behaviour.

*

“What were you trying to get out of the computer?”

The question rouses Lex from the precipice of sleep. He turns his head on the pillow, sliding his arms under its cool underbelly, and is met with the broad expanse of Superman’s bare muscular back where he sits on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched as though, like Atlas, he bore the burden of the infinite sky on them. The artificial blue light from the faintly glowing crystals of the room reflecting off his skin makes him look like he was also part of the room’s foreign stone.

Lex considers his answer carefully. “I want to learn your language. I want to understand you beyond just how you've learned to communicate with us. I want to know you from the inside out.”

From this angle, all Lex can see of his face is the outline of his brow and fall of his curls. He knows he’s won by the slump of those sturdy, lonely shoulders.

“Alright, Lex,” Superman says at length, voice very quiet. He turns and Lex loses what little of him he could see. “Alright.”

*

“I think this is the first time someone's been caught sneaking parental controls on.”

Lex's drawling voice rattles around the echoing quiet of the main chamber of the fortress. Thin streams of morning sunlight pass through hundreds of crystals high above them, highlighting dust suspended in the air. The fleet of robots are all safely tucked away, docked in their stations, repowering, like rows of little tin men. It was strangely peaceful rather than eerie.

Superman sits straight-backed in Lex’s chair at the computer’s controls, in the ever present suit despite the early hour, fingers moving over foreign keys faster than Lex’s eyes can register.

“Just making things as easy as possible for you, Lex.”

Holding his still steaming mug aloft, Lex shoves at Superman's shoulder, forcing him to stop and lean back to make room for Lex to take a seat in his lap in the chair that was now rightfully his. “And here I thought you couldn’t lie,” Lex says, settling back against Superman’s chest, letting out a slight hiss at the pleasant ache that still lingered from the activities of the prior evening. He takes a leisurely sip of coffee.

Superman slides his arms around him and continues working. “You’re thinking of Mr Spock.”

“Don’t use an honorific for the fictional alien.”

“That’s what he’s called!”

The large, circular screens before them flash with bursts of infinitely complex information. Lex tries to follow any of it, catching a stray word here and there, but mostly fails. “How did you learn all this?” he asks, trying hard to keep the awe out of his voice. “Was it just instinctual?”

“An artificial intelligence was sent along with me as a teacher. It helped me build my first robot. After that it was easier.” Lex waits for further explanation but doesn’t get one. It surprises him even though it shouldn’t. Secrets and the continual pursuit of their answers were, after all, a cornerstone of their relationship, such as it was.

After a prolonged moment of silence, he takes one of Superman’s hands, the ever so slightly less dominant one, and puts it under his sweatshirt. Superman takes the hint and begins absently rubbing over the flat of his stomach. It barely affects his level of productivity in whatever it was he’s doing to ensure some of his secrets remained secret.

“I like having the chair here,” Superman says, his mouth pressed against Lex’s shoulder. The flash of data on the screen had finally slowed enough to read, but Lex had stopped paying attention.

“Your taste is awful,” he says, head turned to nuzzle against the underside of Superman’s jaw. “Nothing matches. When I get out of here I’m incinerating everything and redecorating.”

“Can I get one of those swing chairs that hang from the ceiling put in the bedroom?”

“No.”

There’s a slight bristle of morning stubble that rasps against Lex’s skin. He licks a stripe up the tempting hinge of Superman's jaw and can feel where he smiles.

“I really do like the chair here.”

“What did you use before?”

“Nothing. I just stood looking all commanding and impressive.”

“God, you’re insufferable,” Lex murmurs hotly, and filled with a near overwhelming need for consumption, opens his jaw wide to sink his full bite into the column of Superman’s neck, as deep as his teeth will go.

Superman hums, one hand still continuing to travel in lazy circles under Lex’s shirt, the other still working away, and tells him that that tickles.

*

The language program was clearly designed for a child. At first, it’s hard to get past that, especially as it served as a constant reminder that Superman had done all of this decades before him, but soon the sheer wealth of entirely new information at his fingertips is enough to distract.

The grammar portion Lex breezes through quickly on double speed, the impenetrable symbols suddenly making sense once you understood the logic to their complex phonetics. By evening and Superman's return, Lex is slowly repeating extremely basic sentences and actually understanding most of it. It’s also when he realises he hasn’t moved from the chair in eight hours.

“Full crime scene reports, both LuthorCorp’s own and fedpol’s. One USB flash drive left exactly where you said it would be. And one Risotto alla Milanese from Il Cairoli.” Superman tosses both the files and the small black rectangle onto the dining table, then carefully places a black thermally insulated food delivery bag at its centre. He looks inordinately pleased with himself about it all.

Lex snatches up the reports and begins eagerly flicking through them. It doesn’t take long to realise there was as little to go on from the Swiss bombing as there had been for the previous two incidents. The only solid conclusion is the confirmation Lex’s thumb print was the trigger, which he’d already surmised. This time, the assassin would have done everything to ensure Lex was caught in the blast. The one thing they hadn't counted on was Superman standing three feet from him at the time.

After a moment, Superman’s intense, expectant gaze pulls him out of the mostly useless forensic breakdown. “Are you about to ask me to say the magic words?” Lex says, flicking his eyes over him then returning to the file, using Superman’s cheap pen bearing the Metropolis Metros’ gaudy logo to underline a point of minor interest.

“Well, it did take considerable time and effort out of my very busy day to get you all this. Your staff don’t exactly leap with glee at the sight of me. Some of them were actually really mean. I had to go stealth, which your buildings are specifically designed to stop me from doing. The Swiss German police were far friendlier.”

“Yes, thank you for providing me with what will ultimately help you by allowing me to leave.”

“I also got you dinner.”

“And for not letting me starve.”

Lex tosses aside the files and turns his attention to the bag, suddenly famished. The risotto from Il Cairoli was on the top of the list he gave Superman and underlined twice; it was his favourite and was delivered twice weekly wherever he was in the world. The Fortress was probably a bit of a stretch for their delivery route.

“I got the osso buco on the side, like you asked,” Superman says, still watching him with a needy expectation, eating nothing himself. He’s sprawled out on the room’s couch and it makes for an odd image; the mighty Superman lazily slouched on a faded brown Lawson.

“I noticed,” Lex says, hiding his slight smile around another bite.

While he eats, he goes through the USB drive Mercy had compiled for him on the tablet, swiping through a couple of days worth of emails and reports that he'd missed, which were in the hundreds.

“Anything in there I need concern myself with?” Superman sounds lethargic, like it would be an effort to even get up to read over Lex’s shoulder.

“Not unless you're fascinated in the progress of the new Luthorcorp Bangladesh branch building,” Lex says, typing out instructions on a report one-handed.

“GAO approved?”

“Ranking number three in the country for the past four years and five stars on Glassdoor. I take care of my people, if they take care of me.” Lex glances over at him. “Didn’t you read that practically glowing undercover piece in the Daily Planet a few months back?”

Superman lets out a little hum. “Then not tonight at least.” There’s a pause, the room only filled with the sounds of Lex’s typing, then he asks, “How did you get on today?”

Lex swallows his mouthful and clears his throat a little. “Rroshodh khuh rurrelahs.”

“Wow, that’s… that’s actually more impressive than it is dickish, Lex. You got that far in a day?!”

Lex preens internally. “It's a fine line to toe,” he drawls.

The phrase I am going home had stuck out to Lex for obvious, passive aggressive reasons, but also in how it was a particularly cruel one to teach a child so early on given the circumstance in which Superman would have been learning it, the linguistic nuance of the word ‘home’ being a place of origin rather than current residence. Perhaps a pitfall of automaton tutelage. Lex had been interested in seeing the reaction to it and was intent on keeping it in his arsenal as means of prodding.

He returns to his work. It doesn’t take long for yet another interruption. “You’re like a toddler playing on that thing.”

Lex flits irritable eyes over the tablet. He’s seen Superman in various states and moods at this point. Sulky was a new one.

“My heart breaks that I’m not being sufficiently entertaining for you.”

“You can do all that when I’m not here. I’ve been gone all day.” Superman’s voice has an edge of petulance. The realisation that he wants to be the sole focus of Lex’s attention hits Lex like a nicotine rush during the addiction he’d given himself at fifteen just to prove he could quit unaided. He looks back down at his work and takes a sip of water to clear his suddenly dry throat.

“Go get yourself cleaned up,” he says, blunt and dismissive. “I’m not touching you covered in the stink and grime of three continents.” His eyes follow Superman’s heavy, sullen movements as he lumbers out the room. “And when you return you’d better not be in that damn suit!” He calls after him.

Lex is slowly clicking the end of his pen in time with his heartbeat in an attempt to keep it level. Not all of the projects were running as smoothly as the Bangladesh branch opening and it was the singular calming trick his one and only boarding school counselor had taught him that had actually stuck. An irony, as Lex had sent the man into his own nervous breakdown before the end of his first term.

His thumb freezes, pushing down hard, when Superman pads bare foot back into the room, hair dripping.

“Is that my shirt?”

“Oh, um. Yeah.” Superman looks a little sheepish, tugging at the white t-shirt that stretched so tightly across his broad torso it might as well have been a second skin and cut short enough to show a strip of toned stomach. “Sorry, I don’t actually have anything else clean here. Thought it was better than nothing.” The shockingly ordinary blue check of his unbranded boxers wrap over muscular thighs, and when he takes a seat back on the couch, legs splayed wide, they pull incredibly taught.

Lex stiffly releases the pen’s retractable end. “You’re going to stretch it out,” he says, just to say anything. Superman clearly hadn’t bothered drying himself after his shower and the white cotton was sticking to him in places, turning white into faint beige where the impression of his skin was visible.

Superman rubs his hands down his thighs in an action that would look nervous if he wasn’t watching Lex with steady, unwavering attention. “I’ll get you another.”

Lex sits back in his chair, legs spread, elbow stacked on the chair’s arm, pen held aloft in a firm grip. Predominantly, he saw Superman in two states; in the suit and out of it. Both equally powerful in their own way. This half state, in Earth clothes that didn’t even belong to him, was strange. Lex’s clothes.

“No, you won’t.”

Superman shrugs, like he couldn’t care. His hands gather up the hems of his shorts in their continual movements, revealing even more darkly haired, thick muscle. Lex’s eyes linger there, and higher, where he’s substantially filling out the material, then back up to his face.

“Seems like you’re in the mood to show off.”

“I’d rather show you over here.”

“I’m working. You’re not.”

Superman lets out a little laugh, flashing dimples, tilting his head back against the couch to watch Lex through heavy lidded eyes. There’s expectation in that look, waiting to see what Lex would do next. What he would ask for. Lex squeezes out another click from his pen, slow and loud in the quiet room. It would be harder to keep up with his heart rate now.

“Give me a reason to stop working.”

Superman does. Lex doesn’t allow him to do anything more than take himself out from where he’s thick and straining cheap cotton and work himself until he’s all lovely and desperate, head thrown back, his eyes near closed, lips parted to filter heavy breaths. He’s remarkably responsive to orders, adjusting pace and movement on command. Even stopping entirely when instructed, fingers hovering over where he juts and twitches, in a prolonged moment of control that was tortuous for the both of them. It's intoxicating having him like this; so utterly malleable. He keeps stumbling over Lex’s name, like he hasn’t the air to catch it. The plastic of the pen in Lex’s brutal grip creaks warningly.

“Are you thinking about me?” Lex’s voice is strange enough he barely recognizes it.

Superman’s tongue darts over his lips, making them shine. “Yes.”

“What am I doing?”

“Watching me.”

Lex’s eyes linger on the long column of Superman’s exposed throat, wet with rivers from his hair, wanting to put his teeth there again. “And what am I thinking while I watch you?”

“That I look good.”

“Do you look good?”

Superman’s breath catches, his hips lifting up to fuck into his own fist. “Yes.”

“What else? What else about me?”

“Your mouth. Your pretty mouth.”

“My…” That throws Lex. He rubs his fingers absently over his lips, as though trying to remember what they look like. What Superman sees. Suddenly, he’s annoyed with himself. He drops his hand and says with some bite, “Look at you, you’d come if I breathed on it.”

Superman lets out a choked little noise, as close to a whine as Lex has ever heard him, and does come, hips bucking jerkily, liberally coating Lex’s shirt. Lex is on his knees before him in an instant, tugging the material taut to lap up the mess, not letting any of it be wasted, tongue dragging over him through the thin barrier. He takes Superman’s hand and licks the curve where thumb becomes finger where he’d made himself sticky, then takes his still hard cock in hand and puts his mouth around the head and sucks the last of his seed from there too.

Superman hisses, trembling with tension, his hand clamped around the base of Lex’s neck hard enough to bruise as Lex mercilessly tongues the slit, demanding more. After hardly any time at all, he paints it with a fresh wave of release, and Lex moans, sucking hollow-cheeked until he’s wrung him dry.

After, Lex sits back, and opens his mouth wide to show off the milky pool he’d gathered on his protruding tongue.

Superman lets out a breathless, slightly hysterical laugh. “Are you going to keep it all down this time?” He cups Lex’s jaw, and brushes his thumb under his bottom lip. “Keep it where it belongs?”

Lex nods, then closes his mouth and swallows.

*

“Do you think maybe now you should give me the list of people you’ve pissed off enough to wish you harm?”

Lex grumbles irritably into Superman’s bicep. He was in a state of deep somnolence and satiation after a good meal and a very satisfying orgasm, kneeling on the floor, grinding up against Superman’s leg with his tongue in his mouth, and really not in the mood for this conversation, which was probably the reason why Superman had chosen now to have it.

“Your pillow talk needs some serious work.” Lex rolls away from him to lay on his back instead, forearm across his eyes. “It would be easier to make a list of those I haven’t.”

“Lex, be serious.” Superman sits up on an elbow, and Lex can feel his eyes on him like a physical touch. “It’s reached the stage where process of elimination is our best option. We’ve not got much else to go on. You’ve got to give me something here or I can’t help you.”

Lex scans through anything he’s got to hand that might knock either of them out for a while but nothing comes to mind. He lets out an annoyed sigh. “I can’t think of anyone I've recently pissed off to the extent they would need me permanently out of the way. At least, not anyone significant enough to have access or means to hire someone with such abilities and irritating persistence.”

A hand tugs at the one over Lex’s eyes and he lowers it to stare defiantly up at Superman.

“Say that again,” Superman says gently.

Lex shifts a little on the pillow so their eye lines completely align, not wanting any doubt in this. “I do not know who could currently be angry, upset, or just inconvenienced enough by me to send an assassin to kill me,” he says very clearly.

Superman studies his face for a long, unreadable moment. “I can never tell when you're lying,” he finally concludes, voice ruminative.

That pleases Lex. “Is that right?”

“With most people there are signs, most noticeably with their heart rate. It increases on a lie. Not always with the little every day things that we half believe ourselves, but big things. Like saying you don't know who wants to kill you. But you.” Superman traces the shape of Lex’s prominent cheek with his thumb, eyes delving deep. “I can never tell with you.”

It’s not an admonishment. If anything it sounds more like a reluctant compliment.

Lex’s lips twitch, feeling a sense of heady victory that he’d not felt since Superman had first been brought to his knees before him. “Are you calling me a psychopath?”

“Yeah, but like… affectionately.”

Lex's grin widens. “Your dear psychopath?”

“My dear, sweet psychopath.” Superman is grinning too, and then they’re smiling into each other’s mouths, passing their laughter back and forth.

*

Lex catches him after his second shower in so many hours, before the Superman skin could be fixed in place for the day, the bathroom air still cloying and wet with steam. He stands by the mirror, a vast stretch of asymmetrical reflective glass, marbled skin wet like dew, and one cheek still dark with stubble.

"Is this where you do your preening?"

"Usually I try and save that for you, Lex."

Lex's bare feet are cold on the damp stone floor as he crosses the room to step close behind him, watching the mirrored image of a naked man littered with bruises, sucked, bitten, and thumbed, and a naked something else. The something else watches back.

Reaching around, Lex takes the straight razor from his hand. It was plain metal and somewhat crudely designed, as though homemade.

"The strand of your freakish hair I examined was remarkably durable." He tests the blade with his thumb, barely grazing it, and still a thin line of blood wells to the surface. He sucks it clean. "I assumed you’d have to shave with something similar to a power saw."

"Tungsten gets through it. It's what they make turbine blades with."

"I know what it is," Lex snaps. He takes Superman’s jaw in his hand, fingers spanning around his throat. "Hold still." He places the blade at its back hinge. Their eyes meet in the mirror. Lex waits for a refusal but it doesn't come. Instead, Superman tips his head, back and to the side, and bares his throat. Lex adjusts his hold on the cool metal, and wets his lips. Of course, there wasn't any real danger. Even the strongest metal on Earth couldn't cut through that skin. But still.

He drags the razor upwards in a line, curving around perfectly formed bone, watching the process with baited breath in the mirror. Some force is required but the process is a smooth one. Even without any real threat, there was a heightened sense of power at having him like this. So willfully, foolishly trusting. Lex dips the blade in the full basin and repeats.

“You don’t even need to use soap?” he asks with genuine fascination. “Or oil?” He’s never needed to shave, but he understands the fundamentals of the process.

“Nope, it’s nice I guess, but not necessary. My--” Superman abruptly and very obviously aborts whatever it was he was about to say. Or let slip. Lex raises an eyebrow at him in the mirror but doesn’t comment on it.

The morning is made of something quiet, delicate. It’s a fitting setting for this strange ceremony. Lex keeps watching his own actions in their reflection as Superman slowly becomes uniformly smooth.

"You look like someone drew you." Lex intends the comment to come out as a disparaging insult but it somehow doesn't. Superman simply does look intentionally and precisely designed rather than a happenstance of nature. It makes Lex’s botched attempt at recreating him all the more frustrating.

The pair of them are almost perfectly in alignment in the glass, besides that infuriating half inch Superman has on him in height. Invariably, there is comparison. Lex can match each of their features perfectly, note all the differences that make them entirely separate species. From an outsider, Lex would appear the alien. His strangeness was so much more pronounced.

The blade is pressing hard enough now it would have drawn blood from anyone else. Lex doubts Superman even feels it.

“You look beautiful.” Lex's eyes immediately snap to Superman’s, searching for any trace of a joke. There isn’t. Only sickening, saccharine sincerity. It's not the first time he's used that word to describe him. Lex doesn't trust it, can't believe anyone could see the pair of them side by side and still come to that conclusion. Even the blue of their eyes is incomparable.

He puts the blade right at the centre of Superman’s throat by way of reply, over the swell of an Adam’s apple, and drags it excruciatingly slowly, the stubble rasping against the blade on the long procession upwards. Superman doesn’t move, just keeps his lidded eyes level with his in the mirror. Letting him.

“There,” Lex says when he's finished, pressing his own cheek against the one he'd made smooth. Not for the first time, he imagines them blurring, combining, to create something better than the sum of their parts. “Now you’re nearly bearable to look at.”

Superman laughs and turns quick enough to steal a kiss.

*

It turns out a little rudimental Kryptonian goes a long way. By the third day of Lex’s study of the language, he’s set up a translator programme on the tablet using the 118-character alphabet he is now more or less fluent in. It enables Lex to bypass the several hundred protection locks Superman had placed on the computer, then the very last records of Kryptonian culture in the universe are revealed to him.

It was a fascinating cautionary tale of what not to do as a society. Lex drinks it all in eagerly; the science, the tech, the laws, the House system, the eugenics, the staggering amount of colonialism. All hidden behind a palatable narrative of superiority and philanthropy that makes it seem like the pinnacle of civilisation, and one that could not fail. Until it did.

Lex is almost surprised Superman hadn’t seen all the telltale signs of the things he endlessly preached against, but then again, the mind is very good at protecting from what you do not want to see, and a lost kingdom in the clouds must have seemed like only something to idolise to a lost, orphaned child.

Lex is half way through a truly fascinating lecture on suspended animation, when Superman returns. Lex doesn’t try too hard to turn it off.

“You watched me.” Superman has his hands on his hips, doing his serious and stern voice that is only tiresome. “You watched me put all those locks in place. I spent three hours doing it! That wasn't just so you could open everything anyway!”

“Yeah, I don't know why you bothered with all that. It only took me about an hour to get through them all.” Lex takes a sip from his stone cold coffee. Superman throws up his hands, as though imploring an invisible audience to sympathise with what he has to deal with. The robots had all been kept on standby mode, presumably to spare them from Lex.

“You’re unbelievable, you know that? How many ways are you going to betray my trust in a week?”

“Look on the brightside,” Lex says pragmatically, “you’ve now got a second pair of eyes and a much more capable brain to go through all this information. You’ve really not utilised much of it. A lot of it is insane alien dictatorship propaganda nonsense, sure, but there is some merit in their technology. Did you know there’s a way of accessing a different type of pocket universe the Kryptonians created where the inhabitants would essentially just be kept as suspended consciousness? You could keep someone there for hundreds of years, no toll on the body at all, but their mind would still be aware of everything that was happening on Earth.”

“I don’t want a-a ghost pocket universe!”

“What, why not? They’re so handy.”

“Because that sounds evil, Lex! That sounds like the most evil thing I can think of! Oh my g--” Superman begins pacing, hand worrying his brow. “Look, no offence, Lex, but giving you access to this stuff really feels like giving an arsonist a tour of a gasoline factory. I don't want to give you tips.”

“My interest is purely academic.” Superman gives him a look. “Alright, fine, but I’m not an idiot. This culture destroyed itself for a reason. I’m not about to follow in its footsteps anytime soon. Even though I could, obviously, do a much better job with the tools they had.”

“I don’t want to even look at this stuff myself.” Superman stares up at the circular screen of slightly flickering Kryptonian with a look as close to mourning as it was wariness. “I think it should all just be forgotten. Not all ghosts are worth preserving."

“So, you’re going to bury the only records of your lost planet’s entire heritage and history all because you don’t like your parents?” Lex scoffs. “If I centered my entire outlook on Earth based solely on my relationship with my father, I would have blown it up a long time ago.”

“You have nearly done that a fair few times now, Lex.”

“Yes, but I wasn't yelling about daddy while I did it, was I?”

“Well.” Superman’s lips quirk. “Not that one.”

Lex throws his mug at him for that, hard, and begrudgingly appreciates that he allows it to hit him.

*

The argument lasts most of the evening. Lex gets a great deal of pleasure out of riling Superman to the point of yelling, enjoying watching the colour rise in his cheeks, the perfectly tamed curls becoming less perfect, the stern self-righteousness peeling away into genuine anger and snide frustrations. Admittedly, Lex is equally as poor at keeping his cool. He’d never really been able to master screaming without some tears.

It ends in something of an impasse in the bedroom; Lex straddling him, Superman buried inside him, his hands clutching Superman’s wrists and holding them on the pillow above him, keeping them pinned with no more than his will, which in some ways was far more powerful.

Lex watches Superman’s expressive face intently as he slowly rolls his hips down onto him, his own eyes gleaming hungrily in the soft light. There was a time when Superman was entirely stoic when they were together, when Lex could barely even hear him. Now he gets everything. Now he gets to see him truly come apart at his hand.

“Tho rri tahheh,” Lex murmurs against his lips. Superman lets out a gasp that breaks off into a long groan, his hips bucking under where Lex is spread out over him. Lex licks over his open mouth, smiling. “Tho rri tahheh.”

“Yes,” Superman gasps, “yes.”

Lex repeats the phrase over and over, until he feels Superman stiffen and the hot pulse of his come filling him, spilling over between them.

Have faith in me. Have faith in me.

*

The compromise is access to Kryptonian history and culture, none of the science and technology. Lex can live with it. He’s sure he’ll get what he wants eventually.

“Just… just don’t show any of this stuff to Supergirl if she drops by,” Superman says before he leaves for the day. He doesn’t sound entirely confident in his decision but Lex is already scrolling through the archives and unless Superman wants to have another screaming match, he’s fucked. “She doesn’t like it.”

“There’s absolutely zero chance I would even if she asked,” Lex says coolly. He doesn’t care for the cousin at all, what little interaction he’s had with her. She possesses none of Superman’s brilliance nor any of his charm.

She does serve as living proof that even amongst his people, Superman would have been extraordinary. Lex takes a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that.

Lex spends a few hours researching the five main guilds of Krypton, but as the more interesting ones pertaining to their military force and the sciences were heavily censored and Lex didn’t really want all the bother of another argument so soon after the last one, he switches to the topic of the planet's main religion, Raoism, based on their red sun. Lex only gets a few pages in before the utter alien nature of their beliefs unsettles and repulses him so much he abandons it. The idea of Superman ever believing any of that nonsense irritates him.

Superman returns around lunchtime, a deviation from the established routine, with a flimsy excuse of bringing Lex his daily reports that he ferries back and forth. It was clearly just a way to check up on him, but Lex is pleased enough to see him that he doesn’t really care.

After he’s got Lex back in bed and sucked on his tits long and attentively enough to get him squirming and leaking, Superman asks, “What have you been learning about today, Lex?”

Lex lets out a laugh that’s closer to a gasp and a sigh, clutching roughly and purposelessly on Superman’s hair where he’s mouthing between Lex’s ribs. It had been almost days since Superman had tried to manipulate Lex through sex, he was almost starting to miss it.

“Would you like to comb through my browsing history and find out?”

Superman trails lower, tongue dragging over flat, hard muscle. “I’d prefer it if you told me.”

Lex hums, watching him, nails scratching hard over his scalp like a dog that requires a firm hand. “What have I learned…” Superman’s eyes flick upwards, meeting his, as he presses an opened mouthed kiss just below Lex’s navel, making Lex’s head fizz for reasons beyond him. He tips it back on the pillow and draws in a deep breath that he lets out in another small laugh. “I learned that if I were born on Krypton, I would be the leader of the Imperial Kandorian Science Council by now.”

Superman’s brief hesitation reveals his surprise. He lifts his head, expression strangely unreadable; Lex had been expecting outrage. “I take it that in this scenario you have also stopped Krypton from imploding? Otherwise you wouldn’t be leading much.”

“It really wouldn’t be all that hard.” Lex shifts under him, growing excited in another way, imagining an impossible reality. “Krypton’s main failing was giving five guilds equal voice in their planet’s ruling. Too much chatter and bureaucracy to actually get anything effective done. They all just talked themselves into extinction. What they needed was a firm, guiding hand showing them the way.”

“Yes, I’m sure a complete totalitarian dictatorship is just what they were missing.”

“A little passive worship never hurt anyone, if it’s the right person.”

“And that’s you, is it?”

“If I were a Kryptonian. A stomach churning notion, I know.” Lex trails his fingers over Superman’s shining lips. “And you would be my general, head of my military force. Acting out my every command."

Superman cocks his head. “I always fancied the Artisan guild actually. I reckon I’ve got some poetry in me.”

Lex slides his fingers back in his hair, tugging him harshly back up to him. “You’re trying to bait me,” he says against his mouth.

“Right back at you.”

They kiss until they’re both half-mad from it, then Superman is at his neck, his chest. He pushes Lex’s arm above his head, running his hand exploratively over the limb like he’s discovering the male form for the first time, then puts his mouth at the sensitive bare stretch of skin at his pit, nuzzling at it, tongue just as explorative.

“You’re so smooth.” His words are slurred where he won’t move his mouth away from sucking on skin. “How are you so smooth?”

“Fuck you,” Lex pants, and yanks him again by his hair, directing him to give the other armpit equal attention.

Superman is tasting a fading bruise his thumb had previously left on Lex’s hip, having reduced most of his torso to an erogenous zone with his attentions, when he says, “Turn over for me.”

Lex removes his thoroughly chewed knuckle from his mouth to say, breathlessly, “Is that an order for me, general?”

Superman laughs and gives the jut of his hip bone a nip. “Turn over and stick your ass in the air for me to eat, your worship.”

*

“Get dinner from Il Cairoli again tonight,” Lex says against Superman’s neck, kneeling behind him on the bed as Superman slowly redresses, arms wrapped loosely around him. The air stank of sex and Lex was famished. “What you brought back yesterday was inedible.”

“Not tonight, Lex. Sorry.”

Lex pauses where he’s grazing his teeth against his shoulder. “Why? Where the hell do you intend to be instead?!”

“Nowhere. I mean, here, obviously.” Superman stands, muttering about his shirt, eventually finding it and pulling it over his head.

“And do you not intend to feed us when you’re here?” Lex says waspishly. “Or do you just enjoy controlling every aspect of my basic autonomy?”

“Look, Lex, that place is… it’s a treat, it's not for every day.”

Lex gapes at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m not… I don’t make a lot… doing what I do. No one’s paying Superman to stop buildings from collapsing. Not that I… I wouldn’t want them to. I’d never accept it.” Superman runs his fingers through his hair, looking frazzled and perhaps a little embarrassed. “I just… that place is just out of my price range, okay?”

Lex doesn't want to hear this. Doesn't want to hear the tedious mundanity Superman allows to permeate his life when he could have the entire world under his heel. “Then use my card,” he grits out.

“And how's it going to look when I use the card of one of the most famous people on the planet, whose whereabouts are a little fuzzy at the moment?”

Lex flops back on the bed to glare holes in the crystal ceiling. “I cannot believe this is a problem you have allowed yourself to have. You can fly to the sun in under twenty seconds but you can’t afford a fucking restaurant? It’s pathetic.”

He listens to the sounds of Superman finishing dressing in the stony silence, purposely not looking at him. “I’ll try and bring back something just as good,” Superman says, and is gone before he hears Lex’s cutting reply.

*

The dish Superman sets down on the table is blue with white polka dots, the colour slightly faded and pattern worn, and so unbearably chintzy Lex has trouble looking at it.

“You aren’t allowed to say anything until you’ve tried it,” Superman warns firmly, accurately predicting that Lex was about to voice his very strong opinion on the matter. Lex had never had a pot roast before, never even heard of the dish before, but he cannot imagine ever finding one palatable.

“And do any of these crystals also double as a range cooker or are we just going to choke it down stone cold?” he says just to complain.

“Shut up and watch this.” Superman frowns down at the dish in concentration as his eyes faintly glow before emitting a thin red beam, aimed right at it. He holds it for a few seconds then stops, leaving the dish bubbling and steaming. He turns to grin at him crookedly, flashing dimples. “Ta da! Worked out how to do that as a kid. Pretty cool, right?”

It was actually fairly disgusting, unsanitary, and questionably efficient, but also gets Lex a little hard. “You’re going to give me food poisoning.”

“No I’m not.”

The food is incredibly rudimental but the taste is tolerable, for what it is. It is the first meal Lex had ever eaten that hadn’t been prepared by a professional’s hand and he can tell the difference but not entirely in the way he’d expected.

Between bites in the amicable quiet, where Superman wolfs down the food like he’s never eaten before, Lex leans across their plates to press a dry kiss to the corner of his mouth, then goes back to his meal.

*

Tired of endless hours sat in front of the computer, Lex spends the next day trying to work out the mechanics of one of the crystals that powered the Kryptonian computer instead. He’s so lost in his work, taking over the entire kitchen table with Superman’s borrowed tools and a large free-standing magnifying glass to study the minuscule etchings of data contained within, that it’s well past nightfall, the glowing wall crystals subtly changed from bright white to a softer blue tinge, before he even realises Superman hadn’t returned.

By midnight, Lex is thoroughly pissed. He would cause Superman a great deal of suffering for ignoring him like this. Ignored or forgotten. The thought alone makes Lex’s empty stomach clench and roil, and bile rise in the back of his throat. Lex would find some uniquely painful way to ensure Superman never forgot these hours he’d kept him waiting. He’d find that ghost dimension of the Kryptonians’ and trap him in it, keep his mind alive to watch, powerless, as he dismantled every part of his life until there was nothing left of it. So it’d be impossible for him to ever forget Lex again.

When sunlight starts to stream through the ceiling above the main computer, illuminating where Lex sits in his armchair, turned to face the large, unmoving doors, Lex becomes convinced Superman is dead.

Which means Lex would be dead soon too. He would die trapped out here, frozen and starved, with no means of escape from this shitty tomb and no one even aware of where he was.

Mercy knew. Would know when Superman didn’t perform the daily check in to collect the drive that something wasn’t right, as instructed. But what then? Would she bring what was necessary out here in time?

Lex’s mind spins in circles, always returning to that one singular thought.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead

*

When the large metal doors groan open, letting in a flurry of snow carried on crisp evening air and a worse for wear Superman, Lex stiffly climbs out the chair.

“Lex, I’m sorry.” Superman is limping a little, holding his side in one hand, a black thermal bag in the other. There’s a tear in the suit just above his hip that exposes a slice of bloody, partially-healed flesh through the blue. “You won’t believe-- Whoa!”

Superman has to blur in motion to catch the crystal Lex had flung against the far wall.

“What the heck, Lex?!”

Lex snatches up another, ripping it from its place in the computer, and throws it against the opposite wall to the last. Superman zips over and catches it too. “Lex, stop! These things are irreplaceable!”

“Like you fucking care, you don’t care about anything in this goddamn pit!” Lex spits, venom dripping. “It’s all just worthless to you now, isn’t it? Now what they carry is too unpleasant for your delicate sensibilities. They’re all just kept locked away in here with the rest of your little inconveniences you’d rather not think about.”

He grabs two more, throwing them in opposite directions, and is buffeted back against the console with the impact of Superman whizzing around the room to catch them both.

“Lex, that’s enough.” Superman returns to the computer and carefully inserts the crystals back in their slots. The computer hums. Lex darts out the way, snatching up the two nearest to him and backs away, holding them warningly above his head in one fist. Superman follows very cautiously, approaching like he was a spooked animal.

“Lex, just think about this. You want to know what’s on them too.”

“I don’t care, you stupid fuck. You think I care about any of this? The failed, dead planet?” Lex laughs, a cruel, humourless sound. “I just wanted to force you to reckon with your fascist fucking blood. Your own monstrous nature. Don’t you get that? All I want is to hurt you.”

“I don’t believe that.” Superman looks so sanctimoniously certain, so entirely sure he knew him. Lex flings one of the crystals away from him, not even caring where it lands. Superman blurs in and out of vision as he catches it and returns quicker than the blink of an eye.

“You fucking asshole,” Lex hisses. Tears are already burning his sinuses and he hates himself for it. “You were going to just leave me here to rot, weren’t you?!”

“No! Lex, come on, don’t do this. You know I would never do that, especially not to you. You just need to give me a moment. Try to calm down, let me explain what--”

“Don’t fucking talk to me like that!” Lex throws the last crystal as hard as he can to the floor before him and feels a rush of sick pleasure at the sight of Superman stooping at his feet to grab it. “Don’t patronise me like I’m one of your pathetic little victims to placate, who begs the all-powerful Superman to save them because they can’t manage to do a single fucking thing for themselves. You think I need that? You think I want any of that? You do not talk to me like that!”

“Alright.” Superman slowly sets down the crystal on the ground and rises, palms up, his eyes never leaving Lex’s face. His left hand is covered in deep red. Lex blinks at it, registering it as Superman’s blood but unable to fully comprehend the concept. He’d never seen so much of it before. “Alright, Lex. Let’s just talk, like we do. Like we’ve always done. Just you and me.”

“I know why you’re keeping me here.” Lex stumbles a little on the uneven floor on his next step backwards, and Superman lurches forward, as though to catch him, but stops himself in time. “I know why you just give me what I want all the time. Why you took away my phone, why you don’t want me looking at your computer, and keep me locked out of all your secret little rooms.”

“All I want to do is help you, Lex.” Superman’s voice is so sonorous and soothing, unlike any Lex had ever heard. Better, unquestionably better, like everything else. Sometimes he thinks his internal monologue has been surgically replaced with that voice against his will, but then others all he can hear is a deeply ordinary Metropolitan accent. “That’s all I want.”

“Then why won’t you let me leave? I just want to fucking leave!”

There’s a rushing noise, then an unbearably loud clang as one of the larger crystals descends from the high ceiling at a jutting slant, and plants itself on the ground. Two metal doors in its body part, exposing a small empty pod inside, large enough for one person to snugly fit inside.

“What the fuck?” Lex says dazedly, clutching at Superman’s arm, only then becoming aware that Superman was pressed up against him, shielding him. “What is that?”

“Um. Be careful about saying that phrase. About wanting to go elsewhere. The fortress is designed to be sensitive to it and will always provide a means of escape. A hard lesson learned, I suppose.”

Lex shoves him away, outrage burning afresh. “There was a way to leave this entire time? I didn’t just have to just wait for you to come back like some fucking dog?!”

“Well, the pod will only send you to the nearest habitable planet for a Kryptonian, which is Mars, so I really wouldn’t recommend using it.”

“Fuck. You. God, I am so sick of you and all your condescension and all these secrets about all this weird shit. I’m sick of being kept in the dark about it all, having to wait for you to give me anything. I don’t wait! I take what I want!”

“I know, Lex. That’s why I’m doing everything I can to help stop the person trying to hurt you so you can get back to your own life.”

“You’re doing everything you can?!” Lex lets out a hysterical burst of laughter. “And what exactly have you done? What single thing have you accomplished in finding who is doing this?” He takes a step closer, lips pulled back in a cruel sneer. “But you don’t need to do anything, do you? Because there is no master assassin, is there? There’s only you. Who else could have done all of those impossible feats? Who could explode something from miles away without needing a bomb? Who could set up a sniper so quickly it wouldn't even register on a camera? Who else could always know exactly where I was at all times?”

“Lex, I swear, it’s not me.” Superman is remarkably calm and Lex hates him for it. Hates that he is so composed when Lex can’t even stop his clenched, white-knuckled fists from sinking blunt nails into his palms. “I’ll do whatever you need to prove it, I’ll gather whatever evidence, but I’m not the one doing this. I swear I’m not.”

“But I know why you want to keep me here, why you’re doing all this.” Lex takes another step, so close he can taste the metallic tang of alien blood in the air. “You're so fucking lonely out here with only your sad little toys, who don't even have the function to actually give a shit about you, that you want a little wife to play home with. Someone to be utterly obsessed with you, to always be waiting for you, always at your beck and call, made entirely useless for anything else. To smother with your sickening, incessant, unrelenting niceness. To fucking breed every night, pump full of your alien seed, and squeeze out your freak litter, your mongrel babies.” Lex’s breath catches, barely able to get the last word out. He’s shaking, breath coming so hard he might hyperventilate.

“Is that what you think I want, Lex?” Superman brushes the backs of his fingers against Lex’s cheek, wiping away the stream of tears that Lex barely registers. “To keep you and breed you?”

Lex lets out a shuddering gasp, so turned on he feels he’ll black out. “Yes,” he says thickly.

Superman’s wet fingers move down to Lex’s neck, where he must feel the hammering pulse he can already hear, thumb ghosting over his parted mouth. “And is that what you want?”

Lex nods jerkily, more tears spilling. “Yes, please.”

When Superman takes him to bed, undresses him, lays atop him with his full body weight, back to chest, so Lex can barely breathe let alone think, he wraps an arm under Lex’s chest to put his fingers in his mouth, middle and ring, the ones sticky with his own dried blood. It is reminiscent, Lex thinks, as he’s slowly and thoroughly fucked into, body rocking only as much as Superman’s all encompassing embrace will allow, of those old wooden bite blocks shoved into lunatic’s mouths to prevent them from biting clean through their tounge as they’re filled with 120 volts of electricity.

The thought makes him laugh, a garbled, manic sound that Superman hushes, mouth at the crook of Lex’s neck, murmuring words of soothing encouragement into his skin like their own electric current.

Later, when Superman makes Lex’s insides and inner thighs slippery, Lex moans blissfully and bites down as hard as he can on those thick, intrusive digits, now sucked clean and sloppy, and barely even leaves an imprint.

*

“This was supposed to be for you.”

Lex has Superman under him on one of the hard kitchen chairs that can’t be comfortable, but from where Lex sits atop firm thighs, very much is. He wears stolen blue check boxers and Superman wears nothing. Lex leans over to the table to dip his fingers into a tupperware, gathering another substantial scoop of lukewarm, congealed risotto.

“This is for me,” he says, as he pushes it all into Superman’s mouth, not caring to be gentle or neat about it.

Five solid hours of sleep and four orgasms later, Lex feels human again or at least human adjacent. A fuzzy mutedness lingers like a head cold that prevents any thought more complex than actioning the licking clean of his fingers of what Superman can’t fit in his overly stuffed mouth.

“I meant for you to eat,” Superman gets out around the mouthful. He’s got his hands on Lex’s hips, thumbs tucked under the borrowed blue band. “I don’t really have the palette to appreciate $90 risotto.”

“I am eating.” Lex sucks his thumb clean. The peace offering Superman had brought back with him in acknowledgement of his transgression was somewhat appreciated but felt a little too like a half-assed attempt at pacification, one that certainly wasn’t enough to appease Lex. It makes him think of lobotomised housewives drooling over fake Tiffany bracelets while their husband's cock smelt like stranger cunt.

He smears the next handful over Superman’s mouth messily, rubbing it in excessively. “You look so stupid,” he grins in lazy satisfaction, then leans down to lick it up.

“Can’t say I really see what all the fuss is about,” Superman says, sucking sauce off his bottom lip. “It’s a bit like fancy mac and cheese.”

“God, you’re a philistine.” Lex runs both sets of sticky fingers through his hair, pushing it back off his face. “Shouldn’t you be eating moon rocks and martian paste?”

“I’m fresh out.”

“When I’m free from this place, I’m hiring you a professional chef.”

Superman perks up. “Oh?”

“To train you to cook my favourite dishes. No more flash boiled brown slop.”

“Oh, so not to actually cook for me?”

“Of course not. You either need to possess the skills to make the things you need or the means to pay a professional to do it. Neither is just careless, ignorant, and slovenly.”

“Ah, I see.” Superman nods, smiling. “And to cook your favourite food?”

“Obviously.”

Superman runs a hand over Lex’s bare stomach. His grin widens. “For the cravings, when you’re eating for two?”

Lex reaches down between them to press his thumb down hard directly over the large semi-healed gash in Superman’s side, relishing how it makes him jerk and let out a pained laugh, clutching Lex closer to him.

Lex shoves him back against the chair with an arm braced across his chest. He goes down willingly, still smiling, and opens his mouth obediently for his next mouthful.

*

The Daily Planet’s article on the category 8.5 earthquake in Mexico City was the typically dry pedantry produced by the rag, with the only flare stemming from the customary gushing sensationalisation around Superman’s involvement.

“Did you see the survivor tally? The lowest percentage of casualties of any major natural incident this century! Got a whole bus out intact.”

“Yes, and also the very large chunk of metal that gutted you. Far less impressive.” Lex studies that particular portion of the article with great interest and is irritated that there was only a single line dedicated to the only actual noteworthy occurrence in favour of more adulatory descriptions from eye witnesses of Superman’s bravery. Bravery with little risk really wasn’t bravery at all, Lex always thought. “You’ve certainly kept quiet about this other element besides Kryptonite that could penetrate your skin.” Lex casts his eyes over the tablet to Superman, who lays flat out on the main chamber’s reclined treatment chair. Lex sits perched on the side of it, one leg crossed over the other, dressed in his best black cashmere. His gaze lingers on the crooked red line gouged into Superman’s side that had grown visibly paler and smoother in the short time they’d been here.

The reason for Superman’s prolonged absence wasn't a particularly interesting one, but Lex does take some satisfaction in knowing the Earth had to literally be moved to keep him away, and that it was a natural disaster rather than something or someone dividing his attention. The bleeding was less satisfying. Lex didn’t care for the sudden revelation of this other weakness, discovered seemingly entirely by accident and not by him, but it had led to a good opportunity to witness the healing process first hand. He’d always assumed Superman would need to go to space to properly feel the benefit of the sun.

One of the robots hovers, supervising proceedings, which Lex was ignoring entirely. It had already voiced concerns over Lex’s presence, which Superman had de-escalated when Lex started to load up the code for the EMP on the tablet again.

“It’s the first I’m finding out about it too,” Superman shrugs. He looked remarkably comfortable for someone currently undergoing healing therapy and who had just discovered they were less invincible than previously assumed. Even without all the sunrays currently concentrated on him, he’d be glowing. “I’m not even sure where it came from. One minute I was lifting a collapsed apartment block from a sink hole, the next I had six inches of something very sharp in my side. There was a noise that sounded a lot like the IEDs or cluster munitions used by your pals in the US military but I couldn’t be certain. There was a very large crater in the world at the time.”

Lex hums in consideration. His mind was working very fast but outwardly he is, by all carefully curated appearances, entirely calm. “And where is the fragment now?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice to know? I pulled it out after I set the building down, but then there was the aforementioned bus to deal with and then a fire had started dangerously near the hospital, and I lost track of it.” Lex wants to say that he would have personally fed fifty buses filled solely with nuns and orphans into an incinerator if it meant getting his hands on that sample, but can’t be bothered with the stern look that would follow so says nothing. He makes a mental note to leave instructions in the daily drop off to have the site swept thoroughly. If his team was as good as they were paid to be, it would already have been done.

The enforced reading does not end with one article. Before his sanative period in the chair, Superman had insisted on disappearing while Lex took an hour long bath, firstly to acquire lunch from Lex’s premier rated cafe, then collect an entire dossier worth of articles and media documenting his own accomplishments on very particular times and dates. The dates there had been an attempt on Lex’s life.

“Have you got to the clip of me and the goat I saved from the flooding in Mumbai yet? I'm told it went viral.”

“How much of this do I have to watch?”

“Enough that you’re satisfied I was where I said I was and not busy with highly involved plots of attempted murder, kidnapping, and subterfuge.”

Lex tosses aside the tablet, far less interested in what was on it than what was happening before him. “I’d be more turned on if you were actually trying to kill me.”

“Sorry to disappoint. I’ll make it up to you later." Lex tries very hard not to smile and Superman doesn’t try at all. The light picks out the hidden gold in his dark curls. Lex can’t believe he’d never noticed that detail before.

Superman had forgone his shirt to allow the healing sunlight pouring in to be more effective and it makes for an appealing sight, one that Lex rarely had a chance to study in person for such a length of time and without distraction. Had da Vinci ever witnessed this form, he either would have burned everything he’d ever made and started again or killed himself.

“What does it feel like,” Lex can’t help but ask, “when it heals you?”

“I don’t know.” Superman flexes his fingers on his right hand, as though testing their strength. “Tingly, I suppose. Stimulating. Like everything is coming alive or just waking up. I don’t know if that’s what healing for you feels like.”

“Not like that,” Lex says, blunt with the ever present bitterness, remembering his fractured wrist from close to a year ago now. “Mostly it itches and hurts for a long time.”

“Oh. If it’s a big injury it hurts I guess but not for very long.”

Lex holds his hand out in the yellow beams being concentrated on Superman’s form, his skin becoming almost blindingly white under its brilliance, and pretends its effects are the same for him too, and he's drinking in all that power, being healed from the inside out.

“The Kryptonians worshipped their red sun,” he says, almost without thought. “An anthropomorphised version. A god made out of a star. What a ridiculous notion for a society so supposedly advanced. It didn't even grant them further powers, not like our yellow one.”

“Is it really so silly?” Lex turns to him and finds Superman watching him with a small smile. He's put his hand on Lex’s thigh and Lex lets him keep it there. “It’s the thing that creates all life. I can think of worse things to worship.”

“Oh, there certainly are worse things,” Lex says, thinking of all the pro-metahuman and alien cults that had sprung up lately, but can’t quite be bothered with the usual venom. He scoffs, annoyed with himself. “Anything anyone has ever heralded as a god, I have replicated in my lab.”

“The universe is a very large, very diverse place, Lex. Humans have their fair share of beings ready to worship them too.”

Lex can't work out that patronising comment so ignores it. He reaches out and touches the wound at Superman’s side, putting his thumb nail right up against the silvering line where the elusive something had sliced right through impenetrable flesh and imagines it as one of his scalpels.

“Would you ever let me operate on you?” he asks, trying to not sound as fervently eager as he felt. “If I sourced the substance that could cut you? You could remain conscious throughout, of course, to oversee proceedings. Ensure everything is put back as I found it. I’d sow my name into you with sutures after.”

“I can’t say I find the idea of you rummaging around in my insides while alarmingly conscious overly appealing, Lex.”

“Why not? You’ve made quite the habit of getting intimately acquainted with mine.” Superman lets out a shocked little laugh and Lex smiles as he trails his fingers absently over the ridges of his abdominals, imagining repeating the process under the skin. “Does the idea of me being inside you make you uncomfortable?”

“Not entirely," Superman says easily, still smiling. “The prospect feels unnervingly familiar at this point, truth be told.”

Lex hums, amused and pleasantly surprised. He’d not expected that. His wandering fingers move with more purpose. “Liver, two point six times the size of a human’s and able to metabolise three hundred times faster,” he says, tracing over where it lay beneath the blood, muscle, and bone, displaying his already extensive knowledge without even having to pierce the skin. Lex always liked to remind him there was no power he could wield that Lex couldn't counter.

He moves higher. “Kidney, only the one, perhaps due to faulty design." He digs in a little deeper with vicious fingers, right over it, and Superman laughs, grabbing at his hand. Invested now, Lex shifts around to climb fully up onto the chair, hooking a leg over Superman’s waist to straddle him. His back prickles with the overwhelming heat of the focused sun through his sweater. He pulls his hand free and resumes his path upwards. It was an easy one to navigate, Lex could do it blindfolded. Superman folds his arms behind his head and lets him.

“Stomach number one.” He moves a little to the left. “Stomach number two, to aid in the advanced digestion of moon rocks.”

“On Krypton, they were called chahv kah and chahv kai,” Superman says, eyes on Lex’s face. Lex murmurs the names back, memorising them, tracing the organs’ shape.

“A pair of lungs, point three times wider and five times as thick.” Lex lays both palms flat to his broad chest. He has to spread his fingers as far as they’ll go to cover it all. “Thermo insulative and cryogenically generative, and also provides the means of never shutting up.” He moves one hand higher, the right one, and can feel the rhythmic thump of life under his palm. “A single heart. Twice as large as a human’s, often located on the sleeve, and perpetually bleeding.”

Superman laughs, deep and rich, and pulls Lex down to him. The still hovering robot politely requests that the healing procedure not be interrupted but neither of them are in a position to tell it to shut up.

*

Before Superman leaves at the usual time the following morning, he makes fresh promises of effectuality.

“You’ll see,” he says, all unwavering, eternal optimism, “by the end of today, something will have changed.”

“Will there be one more viral goat video in the world?” Lex drawls, stacked up on pillows and sipping the coffee he’d been woken with, which he was developing a Stockholm Syndrome type reluctant fondness for.

“Most likely, but I also mean regarding your case. We’ll get you out of here, Lex, you’ll see.” Superman leans over the bed, knee planted in its centre, looming, and takes Lex’s jaw gently in fingers and thumb. “Hey, show me your tongue a moment,” he says, voice lowered, like he’s got a secret.

Lex blinks wide-eyed up at him, then, without thought, obeys. Superman stoops and licks over it, tongue flicking over Lex’s upper lip as he draws back.

“I’ll see you tonight.” He grins and then is gone.

Lex gets coffee on the sheets in his haste to bury his face in the pillow that smelt like soap and something indefinable, laid out on his belly, hand stuffed down between him and the mattress.

Solitude in the place named for it suddenly feels odd. Unsettlingly pronounced. Lex abandons any attempt at research, thoroughly sick of it, to resume his attempt at exploration, this time armed with a Kryptonian translator and decryptor. The first door he manages to open reveals a vast chamber containing what looked like a glowing pool. Lex peers over the edge of it, and through the water clear as glass, sees luminescent crystals illuminating its seemingly bottomless depths. Lex leaves it alone, not willing to trust any body of water from a people with endless stamina and lung capacity without aid.

The second door that opens after very lengthy decryption reveals a mess of a room, containing a plain, unmade bed buried under a pile of abandoned clothes, and a slightly more well-attended blanket folded on the floor, littered with various toys chewed beyond recognition. Lex gets a glimpse of a few posters of furious looking women screaming into microphones covering the walls before he closes the door again, having no desire to see any more.

The third room he enters is smaller than the rest and contains only a single plinth in its centre, holding aloft a metallic ellipsoid-shaped object, illuminated under a single beam of light. Lex approaches it cautiously, footsteps echoing, scanning the area for any further security but there is none. Upon closer inspection, the object appeared to be some kind of sleek aircraft, only large enough to carry something very small or someone very young. It now only contains a small crimson blanket.

Words in Kryptonian are engraved on the front of the pod in exceptionally neat lettering, as though carved by a precision laser. Lex traces them with his fingertips, murmuring the words aloud.

Kal-El. Our last hope.

*

Immediately upon Superman’s return, he’s shoving a phone under Lex’s nose.

“Just aired on the evening news,” he says excitedly. “Main story.”

The phone displays a camera recording of Metropolis News 8 playing on a television. Lex quickly scans the location for any tell-tale signifiers but the framing is too close to see anything beyond the screen. A pity. It shows Superman standing at the bottom of the steep steps of the Metropolis Museum of Natural History with a series of microphones crowded around him. Spread across the bottom of the screen in large, stark letters: Superman defends absent billionaire. Lex’s heart sinks.

“It has become increasingly evident that the continual and aggressive threat to Mr Luthor is highly credible and very disturbing,” Superman is saying in that self-important, self-serious voice that sets Lex’s teeth on edge. “We may have had differing opinions in our time, but the value of each and every life is equal and beyond measure, and I take these attempts on his extremely seriously. I don’t much care for anyone assuming they have the right to kill with impunity because they hide in the shadows.”

“Are you working alongside the authorities to help apprehend the person or persons responsible for these threats?” a voice off camera asks.

“As I’ve said multiple times, I do not work with, nor am affiliated with, any branch of any government. The fire department and I sometimes cross paths tussling over who gets to rescue the cat from the tree this time around but that’s it.”

There’s some tinny laughter.

“You are aware Luthor has previously made very public attempts on your life?”

“That does not exempt him from the right to live, nor from my aid. Nothing does.” Superman looks a little awkward momentarily. “Also he was sanctioned by the government on a few of those occasions. Another reason why we should all be hesitant to ever give that order.”

“Any reason why you’re out here, Superman, and Luthor hasn’t been publicly seen in over a week?”

“Surprisingly, Mr Luthor doesn’t share his calendar with me, but I assume he’s a little tired of things exploding every time he leaves the house. You would have to ask his publicist for specifics."

There’s a surge of clamouring voices, eager to get in the last question. Superman points to one of them.

“Any words for the people behind this, Superman?” A female voice asks. “They’ll be watching, you know they will.”

Superman then looks directly down the camera lens, expression shifting from the pompous sternness of a high school headmaster into something steely, puissant, and unyielding. “You took your shot, you missed. Now you’ve got my attention. Next time you aim, you’ll have to go through me. Lex Luthor is now under my protection.”

The clip ends frozen on Superman’s face. Lex slowly lowers the phone, letting it drop on the lounge’s couch beside him. “Oh my god,” he says numbly. “You just told the entire world we’re fucking.”

“What? No, I didn’t! I was subtle.”

“Subtle?!” Perhaps Lex was being unfair. Perhaps that is what subtle looks like to a man who wears primary colours like a child and his initial smeared across his chest like a stupider child. Perhaps Lex was the idiot for ever assuming he would actually deal with this competently.

Lex runs a hand over his mouth, calculating just how many business partners and relationships he’d been tending across the world that relied on his reputation of hatred for the alien interloper, and just how much they would be affected now said interloper had just gone on national television to essentially tell a faceless assassin to stop bothering his girl. He swears under his breath with feeling.

“But this is good.” Lex can feel Superman’s imploring gaze on him and refuses to look back. “We’ve shook some branches and hopefully something will fall out. This time aimed at me rather than you.”

“Yes, because you'll be so much more capable at dealing with it than I.”

“Lex, this is about being bomb-proof, not who’s more capable.”

“Clearly not you at media training because that was a shit show! I’m going to look like some fucking flaccid fuck!” He’s already imagining the emails lining up in his inbox from his Media Relations Director, Carol. She’ll make him go on one of those dire talk shows after this, he knows it.

“No you’re not. You’re going to look mysterious and above it all, and important enough that even your supposed enemy wants to defend you.”

“I look like some pathetic coward who got my pet cape to go on TV and tell the world to stop being mean to me!” That makes Lex pause. There was some appeal in a perception that Lex had the kind of influence over Superman that could get him holding press conferences on his behalf, something Superman rarely did outside of print. All just to very publicly defend him. Lex feels his cheeks warming a little so glares at Superman instead.

“And why the hell were you at the museum?”

Superman shrugs. “It’s neutral ground and a public landmark. And visitation has been down recently. Thought some exposure might give it a boost.”

Lex experiences that now overly familiar conflicting sensation of not knowing whether to roll his eyes, attempt to hurt Superman in some way, or put his tongue down his throat.

“Well, as clumsy and fucking imbecilic as it was, it's out there now. I suppose now we just have to hope this would-be assassin is stupid or arrogant enough to take the bait from the least killable person on Earth.”

“You’d be surprised at the amount of intelligent people who do fall for that bait.” Lex looks at Superman, trying to assess if it was aimed at him or not. The grin Superman is failing to suppress is his answer.

“You smug fucker,” Lex says, and leans over to give him a kiss that is mostly teeth.

*

In the deep blue of the Fortress’ bedroom, Lex doesn’t sleep. Superman lays beside him, sprawled on his back, one arm cast outwards where it had been tucked around Lex at the time he had dozed off. The blue is becoming, not the gaudy blue of his costume. This one strips him down into something soft that warms Lex’s bed.

Before coming to the Fortress, Lex had never witnessed Superman sleep. He hadn’t even known if he could or if he simply regenerated energy via the sun the same way he healed. Perhaps he truly doesn’t need it and this was another act in his grand pantomime of being human. He makes a very good show of it if that’s the case. His chest rises and falls, rhythmic and even. His eyelids flutter sometimes, chasing something as ordinary as a dream.

There was something heady about witnessing it, catching a glimpse at a rare moment of complete vulnerability. Lex could do anything to him like this, could touch him in any way he pleased. Leaning over him, Lex brushes back his dark, unruly curls, twirling one around his finger until it sits perfectly in place.

He slides the tablet out from under his pillow and taps open the camera. Photography never truly captures him, Lex has found. It flattens out what always needs to be observed from every angle. Makes him look ordinarily handsome rather than something striking and remarkable. Removes an essential essence. You can’t sense the power in an image, can’t truly feel what it is to be the sole focus of that unwavering, penetrative gaze.

Lex swipes through the photos, dissatisfied. Soon this might be the only evidence he ever had this had occurred. The only time and place he will ever see Superman exactly like this. Utterly vulnerable and utterly his. He abandons the task.

Leaning back over him, he traces the shape of those faultless features with his fingertips instead, trying to memorise them, to catalogue the differences from how he looked when the Superman facade was in place. There was a difference, Lex knows there is.

“Kal-El,” he whispers into the blue. He puts his lips against his like a kiss, and says the name over and over into his mouth, where it can be kept just between the two of them. “Kal-El, Kal-El, Kal-EL...”

*

Lex doesn’t look up from his tablet screen when he hears Superman’s return. “So how many assasination attempts did you fend off today? Your plan was so foolproof, I assume we’re in triple digits by now.”

“None yet but the day is still young. Here’s hoping someone will try to kill me before its end.”

Lex hums in mild amusement and pretends not to be surprised by the kiss that’s planted on his cheekbone. “Shut up and sit down. I’ve got something to show you.” He watches Superman effortlessly pluck a chair from the dining set and place it before him on the couch. “How much do you know about botany?"

Superman shrugs. “Enough to know my zea mays from my triticum.”

“Right.” Not exactly the answer Lex was expecting or hoping for. “Well, do you recognise this?” He flips his tablet around. Superman scans over it. And keeps scanning it. “You have no idea what it is, do you?”

“It would make you very happy if I told you I don’t, wouldn’t it?”

“Incredibly, yes.”

“Then I have absolutely no idea what that stream of data means.”

Lex turns the screen back around, not bothering to hide his smugness. “This is the genetic formula for the oregus plant that was once native to Krypton before its extinction in the third industrial age, which, incidentally, wiped out most natural forming vegetation on the planet. Your people were very good at doing that.”

“Alright.” There is a healthy amount of suspicion in that tone.

“The oregus plant is remarkably similar to a lot of Earth flora, particularly our orchids, and is one of the few Kryptonian plants on record that is entirely uninvasive and compatible with our conditions.” Lex swipes his screen, pulling up a reconstructed image of the large, blue petaled flower to show him. “It provides oxygen, regulates a water cycle, and supports ecosystems, just like ours. Apparently its leaves even made a pleasant garnish, but that is opinion rather than fact.”

“I wasn’t aware botany was no longer classed as a science,” Superman says, now smiling a very odd smile at him. “One would have assumed all information on it would have been filtered and the records remained sealed.”

“It’s a grey area, take it up with your computer," Lex says dismissively before continuing. “If this plant was reconstructed here on Earth -- which I could very easily do -- its entire existence would be, unequivocally, a fundamental benefit to all other life around it.”

“Lex, if you want to start a garden here, I think there are easier--”

“The point,” Lex cuts in, consonants clipped with irritation, “is that this plant is further evidence that something can hail from the oh-so-terrible and fearsome planet Krypton and still be wholly good.”

It’s obvious the moment Superman gets it. His face lights up as brilliant as the white of the snow outside. “Further evidence?”

“Slip of the tongue," Lex says smoothly. “Obviously I meant preliminary evidence.”

“Uh huh. What about Supergirl and Krypto?”

“Counter arguments."

Superman lets out a burst of laughter, harder than was warranted, then slips off his chair onto his knees at Lex’s feet. Before Lex even has a real chance to admire the sight, he’s being pulled down onto his lap, thighs slotted over thighs.

“Is this how you spent your day?” Superman asks, arms wrapped around Lex’s waist, keeping him close, and grinning up at him. Lex enjoys that from this position he’s got the height advantage. “Pouring through our history to find a single positive we contributed to the universe?”

“Not exactly,” Lex lies. “More just something I stumbled upon. I’m sure to find many more examples if I really gave it some thought and had the resources. That ghost pocket universe probably has an abundance of merits too if given the chance to be properly studied.”

“Sure, Lex. Let me also give you my bank details and pin number while I’m at it.”

“Why the fuck would I want that? You can barely afford food.”

Superman laughs again and draws him into a kiss. “Thank you,” he says quietly in the very close space between them, and Lex tells him to shut up before going back to hungrily kissing him, his fingers tugging at his hair.

He’s got his hands under Superman’s shirt, feeling hot skin, and sucking on his tongue, when abruptly Superman pulls back. He’s looking at Lex in that way Lex can’t stand, like he sees through him down to the bone, all without even needing those inhuman abilities.

“This would all be easier,” Superman says, “if either of us knew what you actually wanted, Lex.”

Lex sits back, going cold. He shoves his hands off him. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He never gets the chance to find out, however, as the room is then plunged into strange dimness, the crystals changing from soft white to murky red, like an old darkroom to develop photographs. Unquestionably a warning. Lex stiffens and feels Superman do the same. “What--”

“Stay here.” Lex is back sitting on the couch before he can register the movement, Superman hovering over him. The odd light makes him look like a forgotten Warhol. “Don’t answer the door to anyone but me. You’ll be safe in here.”

“What?!” Lex demands again, outrage and fear rising. “No I won’t! You can’t know that!”

“It’s all going to be alright now, Lex.” Superman is gone in the next blink, the metal door sliding shut behind him, and Lex is alone. The dim red makes every shadow and every corner seem sinister. Lex is up out of the chair and over by the door as quick as he’s able, refusing to be meekly passive throughout whatever threat Superman’s idiocy had brought here. It’s locked but he has his tablet. His fingers are steady as he pulls up the decryptor but his heart is beating so fast he can feel it in his temples.

There’s the very distant sounds of commotion, violence.

The strange letters of the Kryptonian alphabet trickle past torturously slow as they filter through every combination of the door’s code.

Eons later, it slides open.

As Lex sprints down the long corridor, he thinks of all the highly advanced tech and weaponry of his own design back at his lab, all perfectly useless thousands of miles away. All he has now is the borrowed tablet. Logic and reason tells him to find another door deeper in, an exit, a place to hide. Instead, he continues onwards towards the source of the noise, towards the main chamber of the Fortress.

It’s in chaos when he arrives. Thick smog fills the vast space pouring from a spinning grenade in the room’s centre, the chamber thankfully still lit in white not claustrophobic red. The robots are amassing, swarming a single phantom figure in the midst of it. Chunks of their felled bodies scatter the ground, and the grating noise of metal being shredded splits the air. Lex quickly scans the opaque room for a sign of Superman but there’s no trace. He bites back a curse and ducks behind the large computer, sliding down with his back against it, hastily pulling up an infrared camera on the tablet.

“Good evening, Lex. Fancy meeting you here.”

Lex freezes. He knows that voice. Aggravatingly silky smooth, roughened with age, breath barely even elevated. They could have been back speaking over a conference table.

The chances of surviving this encounter had just become significantly worse.

“Slade, you geriatric, orange fuck.” Lex moves carefully around the computer in a crouch, lifting the tablet only high enough to expose the small camera eye to the room. There’s a blotch of yellow through the violent mass of moving green and static blue. A hint of a heat signature through cold, hard body armour. “Haven’t you retired yet?”

“Why would I stop now?” Lex pans the camera across the room, hoping. “When I’m about to take out two of the biggest targets of my career?”

Lex’s heart almost stops. Slumped on the ground, near the Fortress’ entrance; a mound of bright, vivid red. Unmoving.

He swallows thickly, something cold clamping down on his throat. “Kryptonite, Slade? How does a half-rate assassin like you get the good stuff?”

“Oh, Lex, you’ll be surprised just what I can get my hands on when I have a very generous benefactor invested in my work. They really spared no expense in ridding the world of you.”

Lex moves back in the opposite direction, calculating. Deathstroke, mercenary elite, was skilled enough and juiced up enough with his superstrength and heightened reflexes to not stop until the assignment was complete. His cold, emotionless efficiency is what had initially brought him to Lex’s attention -- he came with superb recommendations -- but his unpredictability outside of anything other than killing had ultimately put Lex off. He preferred his agents to be far more pliable and far, far more devoted.

Slade was going to tear through every one of those robots eventually. There was no other line of defense after that. Lex knows from his own assault on the place. The best course of action was to keep him talking until Lex can invent one.

“Like creating a bomb that induces an explosion out of nothing?”

“The Oxidizer sniper. Turns the oxygen in any material into such a pure concentration it causes quite an explosion. Untraceable, 3,800m range, leaves no evidence. Surprised you didn’t think of that, Lex. Aren’t you supposed to be clever?”

“Clever enough you’ve not had much success so far. Does it usually take you over three very public failed attempts to take out a target? But those Titan brats have been hanging around for years. Long enough most of them now need to shave. Is that why you lost interest?”

A robot’s severed head smashes against the wall close to Lex, making him start and nearly drop the tablet. The robot’s jaw works mutely then stills, hanging slack.

“More like I grew in ambition. Imagine my delight when I discovered my target with an almost unseemly large price on his head was being shielded by the White Whale of the assassin world. Your boyfriend did a good job of keeping you hidden from me. I spent days tracking his movements, trying to work out where he’d tucked you away. I was surprised you’d finally caught on and ditched your phone, honestly thought you’d never figure it out.”

There’s a weak “Ha!” from across the room. Lex’s head snaps over to it, both irritated that Superman could still be insufferably smug even now and almost dizzyingly relieved.

“Watching the news when Superman all but announced it doesn’t exactly make you a master strategist.” The distance between the computer and the doors was roughly fifty or so metres. Lex could cross it at a sprint in under ten seconds to reach Superman but that would leave ten seconds of being very obviously exposed, even through the smog.

“Oh, I’ve known for a while now, Lex, but it was good of you to provide confirmation.” There’s an excitable rasp in Slade’s voice now, the effort of slicing through endless waves of robots and baiting Lex finally leaving a crack in that super-human mask. “Surely you didn’t think that was a real earthquake in New Mexico? That the first instance of an Earth-made substance drawing Kryptonian blood was mere coincidence?” He lets out a grunt of a laugh. “I needed a sample. It made dropping by all too easy.” There’s the loud grind of metal and another robot clatters uselessly to the floor. “Promethium, Lex. Ever heard of it? It’s relatively new so maybe not. I’ve brought more along with me. Needed a new sword for a while. I’ll use it to cleave off the Kryptonian’s head and mount it on my wall.”

“Clearly you want to show off,” Lex snaps, trying and failing to keep his voice level. “Why don’t you just come out and say who's been giving you all your toys?

“Not worked that out either? Tut tut, Lex. You are getting sloppy. Or have you just been having too much fun out here to have many coherent thoughts left? I don’t know what Kryptonian mating is like but I assume it's rigorous."

“This is all because I wouldn’t let you in on PlanetWatch, isn’t it?” Lex spits, inching around the bulk of the computer. The smog has shifted enough he can make out the vague outline of blue and red across the room, still lifeless.

“I wouldn’t have joined if you’d paid me in countries. The branding was garish, Lex. Invest more in marketing next time. Simon Stagg sends his regards, by the way.”

That brings Lex up short, stilling him in his crouch. “Him?” Of the many, many lines of enquiries into competitors, world leaders, and collectives Lex had instructed his teams to investigate, all of which had very good reason to wish him dead and the means of doing so, it had never even occurred to him that it might be the greatest embarrassment of the billionaire innovator world. Lex barely even thought about him at all.

“You’ve really pissed off the old bastard, thought he might rupture a blood vessel before I got paid.

Shouldn’t have bought up quite so much of his land, you know how you narcissistic megalomaniacs get about it.”

Lex swallows a curse. He’d forgotten about the farmland in South Dakota. And the coastal property before that. And the industrial park before that. Beating Stagg in the bid for the farmland had just been a mild bonus in acquiring such cheap real estate so rich in meteorites that had gone vastly unexplored due to being utterly squandered as a reservation for nearly a century. Stagg Industries would have no doubt wasted it as well.

Granted, Lex had also been acquiring every contract Stagg Industries was going after in almost every division, but the company was better left sticking to producing household cleaners than attempting to keep up with the likes of LuthorCorp, and Lex was trying to make a point. Better men would have accepted defeat with grace.

“You’re really debasing yourself working with that one, Slade.” Lex shifts on the balls of his feet, springing up on his knees, getting ready. “But I suppose you take what you can get these days.”

“It’s about the quality of the target, Lex, not the client. You should be flattered. Maybe I’ll mount your head next to Superman’s. Keep the lovers united.”

At that, Lex makes a break for it, his sleeve pressed to his mouth to filter the choking smog, timing it with the next clang of metal connecting with metal. He leaps over the uneven floor, dodges the treatment chair still activated in the room’s centre. He doesn’t dare look anywhere but at the large diamond of the grand doors and the figure crumpled before them.

He makes it, he does make it. Sees dark curls and the bright red of the cape made dark with a spreading stain. There is some petty gratification in that, in making it this far, right before he triggers the primed electronic mine laid in wait for him and two hundred volts shock through him, buckling his knees, sending him crashing to the floor.

Every muscle contracts, seizing tight, bucking and twitching. His jaw snaps shut, muffling his scream into something warped and strange trapped in his throat.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, Lex,” says the insufferably smooth voice, echoing around the room. “Don’t fight it, you might piss yourself. Embarrassing way to go.”

With a surge of strength powered almost purely by spite, Lex manages to roll himself from his back onto his side, his shoes scuffing the floor where he continues to spasm. The device pumping electricity through him flashes innocently on the ground before him, winking blue light. Lex could easily dismantle it if he had the tools and his trembling hands balled tight into fists could unclench into something usable.

Beyond the device, a troublingly large dark pool creeps towards him, the red looking shocking against the grey stone. Lex can’t see Superman’s face where he’s slumped on his front but one of his hands is visible under the cape, outstretched like he was reaching for something. Lex has the stupid, moronic impulse to reach back.

He’ll kill us, you useless fucking lump, he wants to scream at him. You promised you’d protect me. Do something. Save your fucking self for a change.

Every gulp of air Lex sucks in leaves a spray of spit on its exhale through his clenched teeth. The stone beneath his cheeks is slippery and wet with his tears.

Even if he could speak, there’s no guarantee Superman would even be able to hear it. If he was aware of Lex at all, he wouldn’t leave him like this.

If he could stop this, he would.

With a noise like something dying, Lex forcibly stretches out a stiff, contorted hand, fumbling for his tablet he’d dropped in the fall. He finally brushes it and very nearly sends it spinning away from him with an ill-timed convulsion. He drags it close to him with the edges of fingertips. It takes what feels like an age to even unlock it and bring up the program he needs.

The robots were their last protection, their disposable non-lives serving as distraction if nothing else. After that Lex would be entirely on his own.

He punches in the final command with shaking, failing fingers.

The force of the EMP blast pulses through the room, producing a clatter of noise as the last remaining robots all drop to the floor, now just as useless as the rest, and the burning, paralysing electricity blessedly ends.

Lex pants into the cold stone, light-headed with a strange sort of blissful euphoria that comes with the end of pain and the release of clenched, tense muscle. It would be very easy just to lay here and enjoy it. He pushes himself up weakly on trembling arms.

He could reach Superman in a matter of seconds, but what would he find when he did? What aid could Lex provide in the time it would take Slade to reach them and liberate them both of their heads? He can hear footsteps, the only sound in the now utterly silent room.

Lex turns, heaving himself up on hands and knees, and drags himself back into the chamber, away from the doors. He’s crawling and Lex has never crawled once in his life.

“Is this the part where you start begging?” Lex ignores the words, moving with as much purpose as he can manage on limbs that barely work. “I can’t say it’s ever worked in the past, but there’s always a first time for everything. I think you could beg very prettily, Lex. You have a very pretty wallet after all.”

“You actually did me a favour in coming here, Slade,” Lex says, measuring the distance between himself and the computer, his maths and memory good enough to be approximate to the millimeter. Just a little further.

“Oh? Trouble in paradise?” There are black boots at Lex’s periphery. He turns, flopping over onto his back, up on his elbows, chest rising and falling with exhausted breaths, and sees him clearly for the first time, emerging through the lingering mist. Even after days of nothing but Superman’s impressive form for company, Slade’s sheer looming bulk was startling. He seemed to take up the entire chamber. The blank sheen of his bifurcated black and orange helmet makes him remarkably anonymous, like he was just another automaton.

He has his sword drawn but not raised.

Lex pulls himself a little more to the right, shoving himself along with his heels. Slade obediently moves in kind.

Lex comes to a stop. Perfectly in place.

“The thing is, Slade.” He manages a small, wicked grin through his exhaustion. “I just really want to leave.”

Slade has time to let out a slight noise of surprise before the large crystal pillar, tilted on a slant, descends at great speed from the ceiling and plants itself exactly where he was standing.

The sound of bone and armour crunching is grotesque but satisfying, like an insect under heel. Lex doesn’t look away.

The doors of the escape pod part, open and waiting for him.

Lex ignores it.

Superman is unresponsive when Lex reaches him, his pallor pale and veins blackened and prominent. There’s so much blood now, Lex nearly slips in it. There’s a pulse, sluggish and weak, under his touch. Kneeling there beside him, Lex can feel it; that sickly, dragging sensation he’s experienced only a handful of times when exposed to raw Kryptonite. If he has any regret at being the architect that introduced it back to their world, there’s no time to think on it now.

Hauling Superman’s limp, unwieldy body across the floor leaves a long, grim smear of blood in their wake. Lex tries not to look at it. He keeps having to pause to catch his breath and adjust his hold on his wrist, his fingers so slippery it's hard to keep a grip.

Every muscle on Lex’s body is trembling by the time he’s successfully heaved Superman’s dead weight onto the treatment chair, but there’s a strange numbness that prevents awareness of it. An unreality to the moment that allows him to keep going. If he stops to think, he’s sure he’ll go mad.

The controls for it are difficult to comprehend, the settings confusing even in a language Lex now mostly understands. Or maybe it’s just the sweat in his eyes. He sets it to default and hopes for the best.

As the platform rotates, the chair rising into position and the crystals above them shifting to let in the last of the day’s sun, Lex lifts Superman’s soaked shirt to examine the wound; a bullet hole six inches down from his heart, liver probably perforated, maybe one of the stomachs, internal bleeding almost guaranteed. It is open and steadily weeping dark blood, the skin around it blackened and puckered with its poison.

Even now, under the fear that has his heart rabbiting in his chest, Lex feels a sick curiosity. He puts his fingers to the wound, feeling the wet, unnatural heat of it. Open like a mouth, like a kiss.

A sudden blare of noise makes him jump like he’d been caught, head whipping around. A circle of holographic screens had risen up around them, projecting a series of old video footage, unprofessional and dated. A Christmas, a children’s party, a first driving lesson. A beautiful boy was present in all of them.

Lex quickly looks back down, nauseating, panicked heat creeping up his neck, and tries to shut out the noise. Not wanting to see.

There’s no time to hunt for surgical instruments, no time to even retrieve the tool box from the kitchen. He slips his fingers inside the wound, digging in deep.

He glances up at Superman’s face at the initial penetration, anticipating a reaction. Some dry, disarming comment Lex can snap at. It’s grey and lifeless, like something already dead. Lex looks back at his hand, the fingers half buried inside him, and tries to keep them steady.

As he works, he absently wonders if anyone had ever come close to this before, been this intimate. Touched him where you can feel the pulse of his life blood at its very source.

He would do anything for him to open his eyes and tell him no, Lex was the only one.

The overlapping voices above them are growing impossible to tune out. More have been added to the chorus; a few Lex recognises but wished he didn’t. They all repeat that awful, ordinary name over and over. Like it means something. Like it was real.

Lex knows what’s real. The conversations on balconies and Lex’s office and whispered across pillows were real, the cape that blocked out the sun was real, the pod in a locked room with the last surviving name engraved on it was real.

The boy at the farm who didn’t play school football to let others win wasn’t real. The journalist with the fake face and fake name on a fake byline wasn’t real. The people who thought they knew this fabricated, hollow man weren’t real.

Lex had seen real, felt real. This week had been real.

He scrubs at his streaming eyes with his shoulder, hissing at himself to pull it together. To stop being so pathetic. To focus.

His searching fingers finally touch something hard but not as solid as indestructible bone. It takes some effort to get out but then it’s there on Lex’s palm, glowing eerie green.

The doors of the Fortress open easily for him, he was so covered in the required DNA. Lex throws the bullet shaped fragment as hard as he can into the blinding white of snow, where it’s quickly swallowed and lost.

The freshness of the evening air beckons him, something he hadn’t experienced in days. Slade would have a vehicle of some kind nearby. Probably military grade, easy to operate. There was nothing stopping Lex from reentering the world now, seeking out the man who had sent him into hiding, and putting a bullet in him himself. Nothing at all.

Superman looks just as sickly as he had when Lex left him. Just as still. Troubling, but then Lex didn’t know the Kryptonian recovery period for Kryptonite poisoning and severe blood loss. The sun was streaming in through the amplifying lenses, concentrated on his form, but evening was quickly swallowing it. Soon, it would be gone completely for another eight hours.

There were the artificial yellow suns from Lex’s Solar Energy Enhancement scheme, but no way of getting one down here. Not in time.

Lex reaches out and feels for a pulse again. It feels weaker than before and Lex doesn’t know what to do.

The voices are grating on him beyond tolerance, their shared laughter boring into his skull. He fumbles for the controls, wanting to shut them all up.

Then he hears his own name.

His head snaps up, searching through the sea of videos. It’s the promotional footage from the publicity stunt in Utqiaġvik, the town with no sun. Lex stands beside Superman at the centre of a crowd of villagers, Lex in black snow gear, Superman in the ever-present blue and red, the glowing LuthorCorp orb drenching them both in daylight that’s artificial but still golden. They’re looking at each other like no one else is there, occasionally breaking to turn in the direction of another camera flash. Lex can’t make out what they’re saying to each other but the Lex in the footage says something that makes Superman laugh.

There’s another clip; news footage of Lex speaking at Capitol Hill, petitioning the ‘Lunches for Little Ones’ bill he’d already bought and secured.

Another; Lex accepting his Nobel Prize in Physics. Superman had been in the crowd that day. Had told him he was there to support all achievements in advancing humanity. Lex had thought it was to steal his thunder.

Lex stares wide eyed up at the screens, eyes darting to another and another. His chest feels painfully tight, lungs straining. Only then does he become aware he’s sobbing so hard that he can’t draw in enough air to fill them.

He abandons the controls to return to Superman’s side, bending over him to hiss in his ear, the brilliance of the scorching concentrated sun hot on his drenched face.

“I’ll kill them. If you die, I’ll find each and every one of them and I’ll kill them all. I swear I will. You don’t get to leave, not until I say so. You can't leave me. So you’d better wake up and stop me.”

*

Lex’s ugly orange chair is in the bedroom, placed at an angle facing the bed, when Superman wakes up. Lex sets down his tablet -- his tablet, a prototype of the latest LuthorLet -- to look at him. “Well, at least that answers one question.”

Superman draws in a long, deep breath. He’s got that drowsy, slightly stunned look again, just as he had the sole morning of Lex’s stay where Lex woke up first and got to see the moment those bright blue eyes blinked open, as though surprised to find himself with another day on his hands. “What question?” His voice rumbles from misuse, pleasantly deep.

Lex finds himself watching him with an idiotic smile on his face and quickly drops it. “That you do actually need sleep. Eighty-two hours is a long time to be pretending.”

Superman lazily scrubs his wrist over an eye, then lets it fall back into his pillow, eyes fallen back closed. “That long, huh?” The blankets slip as he shifts under them, stretching stiff muscles before slumping back, revealing bare skin that wasn’t quite its usual golden but also not the mottled grey of days ago. He looks intentionally posed, as though someone had precisely placed him there, lovingly arranged for a painting or tableau. Michelangelo’s Pietà laid out on cotton sheets.

“Stop moving, you’re still healing," Lex orders, voice clipped. It softens a little when he follows it with, “How do you feel? Still tingly and stimulated?”

Superman hums, lips twitching into something close to a half smile. “More like hurting and itchy.”

“How debasingly human of you.”

Superman’s heavy eyes blink open and he fixes Lex with a surprisingly focused look. “What about you, are you alright? Did he hurt you?”

“Oh, I’m perfectly fine.” Lex loosely links his fingers in a bridge, elbows resting on the chair’s arms. “Only one of us was dense enough to set a trap that they were woefully unprepared for.”

Superman nods, accepting. “I didn’t even see him. Not until he shot me. He’d got the doors opened somehow but was still out somewhere in the tundra. I should have seen it coming, it was the same sniper as before. I’ve never not been able to dodge a bullet before.” He looks at Lex, eyes imploring. “Lex, I… I should have--”

Lex immediately holds up a hand. “Spare me your contrition. Does it look like I required help? You’re the one who needed saving. I’ll accept your effusive gratitude instead.”

Superman’s smile is a little stronger this time. It shows his dimples and Lex never thought he’d be so pathetically, dizzyingly pleased to see it. “Well, thank you, Lex, I appreciate it.”

Lex stands from the chair, movements deliberately casual, to perch instead on the side of the bed. He folds his hands in his lap, laid over crossed thighs. “I’ll have to consider very carefully just how you can make it up to me.”

Superman brushes the back of his fingers against Lex’s folded ones. “If we’re keeping score on life saving, I think we might be even at this point.”

“Don’t keep a tally, it’s gauche.”

Superman lets out a small laugh that trails off into a gasp of pain. He moves his hand away to hold his injured side. “Do I even want to know what you did with him?”

“Your floors have been sufficiently cleaned,” Lex says smoothly, “that’s all you need concern yourself with.”

Slade’s rapid healing factor had miraculously allowed him to survive the incident, though some comparisons to mince meat could be made. Lex was greatly looking forward to building him back into something far more palattable and far more loyal.

“What about-- The robots, did he…?”

“A conversation does need to be had over just how temperamental you make your automated aids,” Lex sniffs. He had already made a note to look into this interesting Promethium for his own creations; Slade’s blade was being pulled apart in a LuthorCorp lab as they speak. “Some were unsalvageable but the majority are back in one piece. I had a lot of waiting around time while you cooked, and I didn’t fancy lugging you backwards and forwards from the chair on my own.”

Superman bites on a smile. “You fixed them for me?”

“I fixed some. They took care of the rest after that. I removed some of their audio functions, which you can also thank me for. The chatter was truly intolerable.”

“You have been busy. This is new.” Superman nods at Lex’s suit of crisp black wool. Lex tugs his sleeve into place.

“Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve had a new Westwood.”

“I mean new for here. It wasn’t in the things I brought you.”

“No, it wasn’t. I’ve come and gone a few times. I added my DNA signature to the Fortress’ access registry, by the way. Made things easier. I also brought back a LuthorCorp artificial sun for if you ever feel like getting injured again during those inconvenient hours without sun, which account for half of existence. Another thing you can owe me for.”

Superman suddenly looks serious. “Lex, do I need to be concerned about who or what you've brought or taken from the Fortress while I’ve been out?”

The mistrust is irritating, if warranted. “You will do anyway regardless of what I say, but you needn’t. The only thing that’s left here is a smear on the ground previously known as Deathstroke the Terminator, and the only thing brought back is what I’m currently wearing. I’ve barely even been on the computer. I have actually been busy with my own affairs.”

Lex had in fact been torn about leaving. Every time he looked away from Superman's steadily healing form, he expected to find his skin returned to its grey, sickly pallor when he looked back. He’d waited until the very last possible moment for a reason, when Superman’s vitals were steady enough it was clear he would regain consciousness within the day. There were things Lex needed to take care of, and a task of the utmost importance to complete before Superman was back fighting fit and able to hear just where Lex’s heart was beating faster.

He had almost felt sorry for whomever would find Stagg after Lex was through with him, but then the reports on the news had disclosed it was his daughter who’d discovered the body spread across multiple rooms of his Metropolis home, and that only made Lex smile.

“That suit’s not exactly appropriate attire for the Antarctic.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You’ll be going soon, then?”

“Now you’re awake, yes. I’ve meetings in most of the major cities over the next few days. It’s disheartening how many people seem to lose faith if you’re out of the public eye for just a little while. I’m having to provide a few gentle reminders in key places about my leadership abilities.” Lex would have been disappointed in the teams he’d compiled in his many branches and divisions across the globe if there hadn’t been at least some power plays in his absence -- it was part of the skillsets he’d hired them for after all -- but now it was time to stamp it all out. Quickly and brutally.

“Oh, yeah. Of course.” Superman is quiet for a long moment, eyes downcast, then he blurts out, “You could--” Almost immediately he cuts himself off, lips flattening.

Lex patiently lets the silence endure, waiting to see if he was brave enough to continue. He, of course, was.

“You could always stay. Just for a little while longer. Maybe we could see about getting signal out here or something so you could work.”

There’s a tightness in Lex’s chest, an ache that has frequently flared, sharp and potent, over the past few days. He scoffs derisively. “What, like a kept pet to make the place seem less empty?”

“No,” Superman says, “not like that.”

Lex looks at him, meeting his unflinching, absurdly sincere stare, and can’t help but reach out and brush his fingers over his cheek that Lex has kept smooth the past three mornings.

Once Lex had successfully scrabbled together a crude contraption out of robot scraps, borrowed computer parts, and the ever-reliable tablet to rip a hole in their universe and create a doorway to the Kryptonian ghost pocket universe next to the bloodstained treatment chair, there was a concern that this faultless body and all its complex details that Lex had committed to memory would get lost or ruined in the process. But the healing sun was gone, locked away for hours, and Superman's preservation in suspended animation to wait out the sunrise was the only solution Lex could think of.

He had weighed up his options beforehand, hunched on the cold Fortress floor, miscellaneous parts scattered around him, hands bloody and sore, considering all the uncertainty of this untested, alien place that was all just theory, and the potentially universe-ending results if his rushed calculations were off by even a decimal point. But there was only one path which held even a slim chance of Superman’s survival, so that was the one he took.

The universe had held together, its seams intact, the ghost pocket universe proven as fascinating and useful as envisioned, and Superman now lay here whole and well, and Lex no longer had any reason to remain.

“You know that’s not going to happen," he says.

Superman puts his hand over Lex’s, holding him close to his cheek. “I don’t know that.”

Lex pulls back quickly without resistance. “You’re being stubborn and childish. In what world would this set up be feasible in the long term, for either of us? You need more time in the chair, the blood loss has made you even more dim.”

“Yeah,” Superman says absently. “Guess I am.”

Lex stands, buttoning his blazer. His fingers fumble a little on the action, suddenly clumsy. He swallows down something and checks his watch. “The robots will be in soon to take you for the next session. It’s scheduled for once every two hours when the sun's up, then every three with the artificial one. You’ll do it until you can fly without wincing.”

“Alright.” Superman looks so strangely vulnerable, tucked naked and forlorn under the sheets, that Lex gives into the sentimental urge to lean across and press a kiss to his cheek.

“I might try and squeeze in a visit tonight to check up on you. If I have the time.”

“Right, thanks,” Superman says flatly. “See you, Lex.”

Lex brushes back his well-tended hair just to touch him one last time. He knew Superman could really tell when he was lying.

*

It was a warm evening, pleasant enough to leave the penthouse windows open to bring in a gentle breeze, but Lex wears a woolen Ralph Lauren roll neck. There is a lingering chill he cannot shake that he blames on the Antarctic conditions he’d been extensively exposed to, and not the absent six foot four furnace that had warmed his bed for close to a fortnight.

The sheer curtains hanging before the open sliding doors dance in Lex’s peripherals as he finishes up a lengthy and scathing complaint addressed to the Director of fedpol that he’d finally gotten around to about their substandard handling of his chalet bombing case. He had expected a better standard of treatment considering he did technically own the mountain.

Then, in the sheets of gossamer, the outline of a tall shadow appears, as nebulous and elusive as their shifting shape.

Lex’s fingers still on the keys. “There you are.” He deletes his last half-formed paragraph that was mostly just thinly veiled threats of his extensive Swiss connections, and writes a quick sign off instead. “Just so you’re aware, you had about six more hours until I was planting some well placed bombs of my own to make a point.”

Superman steps through the threshold, the material seeming to dissolve around him. “I had my own overdue obligations, Lex. Four days is a long time to be absent. Not as long as yours, of course, but enough to be noticeable.”

“And judging by the number of days that have passed, I was right at the bottom of that list.” Lex hits send, not bothering to proofread, and looks expectantly over his desk.

Superman looks as inhumanly perfect as if he’d just been taken out the box. Not a hair out of place, skin immaculate with a healthy glow. So different to the last time Lex had seen him. The suit suddenly seems strange, a prop rather than a skin he inhabits. Were the colours always so vivid?

“I would just rather have no other distractions, so as to give you the proper time and attention, Lex.”

Lex closes his laptop and stands, moving around his desk. “Good answer. Sounds like one taken out of a hostage negotiation handbook.”

“Got any I should know about?”

“Not presently, but I have only been back a while. Ask me again at the end of the week.”

Superman lets out a mildly amused hum. He’s got his arms folded, posture rigid, as it usually was when standing in this room, only he hadn’t done that with Lex in a while. Lex perches on the edge of his desk, mimicking the pose. There is a lingering silence. Maybe Superman can’t quite remember how they’re supposed to do this either.

“I heard you gave back the farmland,” Superman says, apropos of nothing. “The families wanted to thank you in person when I told them it was you. I said to maybe make a statement to the press instead, you’d prefer that.”

Lex shrugs. “My lawyers found a mutually beneficial arrangement. I get to keep what I want from it, gain a modest proportion of their profits, and I don’t have the embarrassment of owning real estate West of Keystone City.”

“It was good of you, Lex. Well, mostly. I know there was some… history there.”

“Nothing even worth mentioning.” If this was the sole reason Superman was here, Lex regrets even having bothered. He should have just stripped the land of its resources and then salted the earth.

“There was something I wanted to ask you actually.” Superman drops his hands, putting them on his hips, then, apparently dissatisfied with that position as well, clasps them behind his back. “If you’re up for that.”

“Up for what? You asking me something?!” Lex snaps, irritated with this circuitousness. It had only been a matter of days since Superman had woken him by telling him he wanted to fuck him in the shower. Now here he was dancing around even asking a stupid question.

“Um, right.” An air of unquestionable awkwardness lingers as Superman stiffly takes up space next to Lex on the desk, leaning back against it, hands hooked around its edge. “I know I still owe you, Lex. For what you did back at the Fortress with Deathstroke. And for taking care of the robots. And me.”

“Oh, that.” Lex lifts one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “I told you I’d get back to you on that. Never know when calling in that particular chit may be useful.”

Superman rolls his eyes, a sardonic gesture that strangely removes something rigid and places them back in another time and place when the air was colder but the space between them felt warmer. “Well, while you stew on how to best work that to your advantage, I’d like to do something else for you in the meantime. I want to take you out somewhere.”

Lex blinks at him. “Take… me out?”

“I know you weren’t overly impressed by the meals I provided, so I thought I could take you to one of the places you recommended now you’re back in the city. I mean, maybe we’ll have to get take out or rent out a room or something. I do attract quite a large amount of attention, and after that press conference you probably don’t want--”

Superman’s ramblings are cut off by Lex grabbing his head and pulling him into a fierce kiss. “You’re not going to do anything as idiotic as taking me out to a public restaurant in your goddamn red underwear,” he says in an excitedly hushed tone in the close space between them. “Instead, you are going to exhaustively research every single Kryptonian recipe to be found on that computer of yours, and you are going to cook me each and every one of them. Then you are going to introduce them to me, by name and extensive culinary history, and I am only going to take a single tiny bite of each, then I am going to watch you eat the rest while you tell me how fucking awful it all is.”

Superman started smiling a while ago and now is properly grinning. “What if it’s actually pretty good?”

“It’s going to taste foul because it’s disgusting alien food and you are a terrible cook.”

Superman laughs and slips off the desk to lift Lex by the thighs and hike him properly up onto it, slotted in between. The laptop skids off the desk behind them, clattering to the floor, and neither of them even register it. “That sounds like quite an involved evening, Lex. You sure you can spare the time?”

Lex loops his arms around his broad shoulders, hooking heels around knees, pulling him even closer. “I’m sure I could squeeze you in somewhere. You’ll have to pick me up. Even the most advanced LuthorCorp jets take an age to go Metropolis to fuck-knows Antarctica.”

Superman presses a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth, grinning all the while. “The place just hasn't been the same without the constant anticipation of what you'll do to it next, Lex.”

He leans in for another kiss but instead Lex catches his jaw, gripping with mean fingers to study him, eyes darting about that face, trying to understand what was different now. To pinpoint the key shift that had alluded Lex all these many days, which turned Superman from the tedious, self-important alien that everyone so adored into something else. Something strange and interesting and just like Lex. Something that understood the distance that separates them from other people, that made them other and freakish and better that wasn’t just foreign blood or a fault in the genes.

Lex thinks he finds it or at least a piece of it in that smile that was a little wry and a little wicked and knew Lex just as he knew him.

“Nowhere is the same without me, Kal-El.”

He likes the way the name sounds, the shape of it. It felt oddly more normal than the self-appointed and self-aggrandising title stolen from Nietzsche. Lex imagines he could always have the taste of it in his mouth and never get bored.

There can't be anyone left who uses it anymore, no one who matters. It can be kept just for Lex, to name the man only he gets to see.

The moment of stunned silence it leaves in its wake is satisfying. Catching him off guard always is.

Then the smile grows even wider, beaming like the sun, and Kal-El is kissing him, deeply and tenderly, over and over, and Lex doesn’t have to think about much else for a while.