Chapter Text
Clark hates what Lex has done. Hates it so much he can’t stop thinking about it. Even after he and Lex have talked it out, it stays under his skin, bubbling up hot and uncomfortable. I mean, God, all those women. He’d known Lex was older, more experienced. Had assumed he’d been around the block a few times. Clark Kent might be a lot of things, but he wasn’t naïve. (He told himself this firmly, like how his Dad had always taught him to shake someone’s hand.) I mean, Desiree, Helen… It wasn’t like he hadn’t known Lex was having sex. The sex wasn’t the problem. Lex was allowed to… I mean, everyone has urges.
Clark shakes his head, dropping the bay of hale he held onto the pile he’d built up so far. He’s been squishing its corners in his fists without meaning to, and he scrapes the stray stalks off of his distressed, pink palms. Thinking about Lex’s urges wasn’t helping anything. He rolls his shoulders, trying to dispel his restless agitation. He’d hurt those women, that was the problem. At the bottom of Clark’s inexplicable pangs of hurt lies a shattered picture of who he’d thought Lex was.
Clark thought he knew Lex better than almost anyone. Best friends for how many years? (But how many of days of those years went by without a lie slipping out of either of their mouths?) It just didn’t match up with the Lex he knew. Lex was a generous friend, a reliable one, a kind one. He’d called off important meetings more times than Clark could count when he’d needed help, or advice, or just someone to be with. He could be noble, sometimes. Self-sacrificing. Clark had heard his Mom talking with the girls once about people with penchants for ‘fixer-uppers,’ but he couldn’t help it: he saw right through Lex’s many masks, to his great potential to be a good man. The Lex he’d embraced when first came back from that desert island, the smile on his face, the sun on his skin and the warmth in his voice – that couldn’t be the same Lex that had treated those women like trash waiting to be taken out.
That hug outside the barn…the uncommon way the touch had lingered on his body, an imprint of Lex, or the atoms in between them.
Clark grabs another bay of hale. Come on, be useful. Fact of the matter was, he’d been assuming that Lex was the same as a sexual partner as he was as a friend.
A good lover? His brain helpfully supplies. No, not that. Well, he’s sure Lex is. He’s always walked with a certain seductive air, a confidence beneath it that couldn’t be faked or even bought. As far as Clark’s concerned, Lex knows everything: history, mythology, business, people: why wouldn’t he know everything about sex?
Not a good lover, he corrects. But…considerate, at the minimum, surely?! Lex had seemed to really care about Helen once upon a time. He can’t have been so callous with her. Clark had always assumed whoever ended up with Lex in the long term would have been lucky to have him.
So he’s the biased best friend. Sue him. Except right now he feels a lot more like the stupid little kid who met one of his heroes and got hit with a face full of dirt.
It’s normal to feel let down when people aren’t as good as you think they are, he reminded himself. And this stuff isn’t good for Lex. It isn’t morally good. It’s…he searched his mind for long-forgotten words from dusty churches from brief Easter appearances when he was young. Depraved. There we go. It’s depraved.
His father’s words echo in his mind. “Lex is just following what he’s learned, son, that’s all.”
Jonathan Kent was never in Lex’s corner, and that made him take it very seriously.
There hadn’t been a lot of love in Lex’s life, and all his wives did keep trying to kill him…could it be he really just hadn’t learned any better? Did that imply…could he be taught?
He needed to change, that was for sure. People had gotten killed. God, Lex’s sexual appetites had killed people. But then…Lex had confessed that he’d almost wanted to die. Where did that leave things?
Clark’s hands moved to grasp the axe in a far corner. The firewood would barely even see him coming.
Lex had to change, because he couldn’t keep wanting to give up on living. Clark was fuzzy on the link between needing casual sex with faceless, nameless women and passively surrendering to death, but Lex had brought it up like the connection was important. Clark runs a hand through his hair. He’s starting to get a headache. He splits a few more logs out of spite, but they go careening across the barn from the utterly excessive force. Sighing, he retrieves them.
He had to work out the link, because he had to save Lex. He didn’t have a clue what was going on with Lex’s newly revealed sexual predilections, or why the pit of his stomach only grew at the thought of them no matter how much carefully spun out logic he stuffed in it to snuff it out, but he did know one thing. Clark Kent will always save Lex Luthor. Rescuing him from the flames, of course, had been much easier.
Silhouetted in the barn doorway, he stills. Lionel had been all bad, a rotten apple if ever there was one. Having Clark in his body seemed to have transformed not only his physical health but his spiritual sense of self. He’d even helped Lex. How far did the apple far from the tree, anyway? Could Clark cure some dark thing in Lex that stopped his friend from being happy, too?
A body swap was out of the question, though. Even if he could locate the artefact, Lex couldn’t know about Clark’s powers, or their source. He’d lied about the women and lied about too much else of late that should loom much larger to be trusted with that particular secret. How else could Clark get inside him, to help him, to heal him?
Inside. Inside Lex.
Clark’s eyes widen, and before he knows it he’s ricocheted clean off the farm’s property lines, gone in a blast of superspeed to the wooded canyon at the end of town.
“Right, cool. Nothing. It’s nothing,” he says aloud to no one. A few birds chirp at him from mossy branches, and a drop of water drips down and splashes onto the bridge of his nose.
Clark Kent was a lot of things, but he wasn’t naïve. (It was sounding less and less good to him the more he said it.) There were ways two men could be inside one another without any mystical mumbo jumbo involved. But God, that wasn’t what he’d meant at all. He hadn’t even been thinking about that. He’d never thought about that. It wouldn’t even work. Could it?
Anyway, Lex isn’t gay. All those women. Long hair and draping dresses and Lex spread out in silk sheets mouthing invisible words country farmboys could never imagine. That single rivulet of blood running down his exposed chest where he lay bound in the chair when Clark saved him and the glint of diamond earrings on cold mornings after. If Lex swung that way, wouldn’t there have been some men in the mix, too?
Anyway, Clark isn’t gay! There was Lana. And, for a few weeks or days, really, Chloe. But mainly Lana. That’s right. Beautiful, dreamy Lana, with her wide perfect smile and her beautiful dark hair and her way of saying exactly the right or wrong thing to get him out of step. Nothing like Lex. Clark liked girls that looked nothing like Lex. Not, he reflected, frowning, that there were many girls who did. Lean lines and that strangely exposed skin at his scalp and those hawkish eyes, a way of moving like a thundercloud.
Anyway, it wouldn’t work. Clark refocuses. He has to find a real way to fix Lex, to save him. The idea of Lex passively accepting death barrelling at his face one day really does terrify him. Because this was Smallville, and Lex liked to paint a target a mile wide on his back. Sooner or later, it would come for him, if nothing changed, it would take him. No matter how many lies Lex stuck between them, Clark instinctively senses that this is one loss he can’t weather.
*
Unfortunately for Clark, the only person he could turn to for advice was none other than the man himself. Although he briefly considered Chloe, it would’ve been a betrayal to tell anyone else what Lex had said. About not knowing why he wanted to go on. About saving the world a lot of grief. Clark tries to unclench his jaw, let go of the anger that came at that phrase. The world. What about Clark?
Who else knew enough about Lex, about the philosophy of good and evil, about sex? He brushed inside the mansion without knocking.
“Clark! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The genuine surprise and happiness unfolding across Lex’s face as he spins around in his office chair knock Clark off course. He steadies himself; a new strategy would serve just fine. Lex would open up much more easily after a relaxed night together. The thought has an acrid taste on the back of his tongue: he’s turned positively Luthor-like. Would the ends justify the means?
“Are you busy tonight? We haven’t caught up in a while, and I was thinking about that movie you wanted to show me…the one with the war in the desert?” Clark hadn’t wanted to watch a damn thing set in sand after Lex had gone missing on that island, hadn’t wanted to reawaken any painful memories for him, but he needed an in.
Lex quirks his mouth. “Lawrence of Arabia? Yeah, okay.”
Clark expected the movie to sit as a listless backdrop to his churning thoughts and half-formed plans, but he finds his entire attention stuck into the three-hour film and the glorious, sinking weight of Lex on the sofa next to him. Not close enough. He frowns at the thought, neck prickling, and inches his fingers down his thigh to rest at what he hoped was a normal position. He was here to do reconnaissance, not for any crazy Hail Mary’s. It’s just like a pink elephant, he told himself. Once you’ve had the thought and you try not to think about it, it just keeps popping up. It doesn’t mean anything.
“Did you like it?” Lex asks as the credits roll.
Clark drags his eyes to his friend’s face, soft in the blue light, out of the gripping story. It left him with an unsettled feeling, nested like a strange bird come for the winter in his chest. “Yeah. Uh. Wow. What a movie.”
Lex laughs, and pulls his feet up onto the couch, clearly content to sit still a while longer as the final score plays. He looks like a little kid. Clark’s heart twists. He couldn’t hurt anyone like he’d hurt those women. He couldn’t have meant to, wanted to. Clark knew Lex.
Then, too swiftly to realize it might have been a mistake, Clark adds, “He reminds me of you.”
Lex’s spine stiffens imperceptibly. “Lawrence? How so?”
“He has a…brightness, an intelligence.” A grace, Clark doesn’t say. “A sense of humour,” he continues onto easier territory. “And he’s a commanding leader. But he’s kind, too, human.”
He isn’t sure when Lex’s eyes turned to him, but they’re getting big and round.
He clears his throat. “But he can go too far. Lose himself in the warpath, in his own plans. Get himself hurt.” Burn everyone around him with the fire he holds inside. Burn me, if I’m not careful.
Burn himself down to cinders, if I don’t do something about it.
“Oh,” Lex says, letting out the single syllable loose and low.
“What do you think would have happened if he’d stayed with Ali? After he nurses him back to health?” Clark asks conversationally.
Lex shrugs. “Apart from altering the course of a fictionalized version of history, you mean?”
“Yeah. I mean, do you think he’d have been happy? He said he felt more at home among them than his own people.”
Clark senses that for what might be the first time ever, he’s asked a question Lex doesn’t have an answer to.
As if on cue, Lex replies, “I guess we’ll never know. That wasn’t in the cards for them.” He settles back against the couch and stretches one arm out over the back, running his other hand over the scar on his lip. “You know, it’s widely believed that Lawrence was a homosexual.”
Though his pose is magazine-worthy, glossy and relaxed, the humming tension is back in Lex’s body.
Clark gulps in the beat that follows. It’s the silence he’s listening to, not Lex’s words. This is his time. The night is velvety and black outside, and if he leaves it too long, goodbyes will fall upon them like tolling bells and he’ll have to go home.
“Lex, what did you really want from those women?”
He couldn’t have timed it better if he’d tried. Lex looks positively relieved at the change of subject, like Clark’s lifted a noose Lex had just hung around his neck himself.
“I mean,” Clark stumbles on, playing up the dumb adolescent card so that Lex would go with it, thinking he was giving Clark something he needed, “You said you didn’t know why you kept going. And it seemed connected to…all the girls…and the sex…and I just. I wanted to understand the connection, I guess. You’re my friend,” he adds lamely.
Lex appraises him steadily. He gets the sense Lex is impressed with what he sees for a solemn second before he gets up and pours himself a glass of brandy from the decanter. Too slowly, like it’s a prop in a stage set rather than real liquid. “It’s just the comfort, I suppose,” he answers, voice suspiciously even.
When he turns around, his arms shrugged open, as if inviting friendly fire while begging Clark to hold back. “Losing yourself in someone else for a while…forgetting what’s in your head in favour of what you can feel, what you can make them feel. It’s infinitely preferrable. You’ll have to trust me on that one, I suppose.” He gives a dry, hollow laugh. “That and having the, uh,” his lip curls like he’s afraid to admit it, “the closeness of it.”
“The closeness,” Clark echoes.
“Yeah Clark,” Lex continues, an irate tone making its first appearance in his voice. “There get to be lot of cold, dark rooms in my palatial abode, what can I say? Is that enough for your Torch intrigue piece on the subject?”
“Lex,” Clark says. “You’re not being fair.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Lex’s eyes cast around the ground, like they’re looking for something he’s dropped.
“You didn’t want to hurt them?” Clark knows he’s pushing his luck, but he asks them anyway.
“Of course not,” Lex blinks.
“Aren’t there other ways of getting comfort? Closeness?” Clark’s off his feet, drawn towards the only other figure in the room as if by muscle memory for a dance he’d learned in his sleep.
Clark hates how Lex might as well be looking into another dimension through the hardwood floors. He reaches up and fits his fingers to Lex’s jaw, gently lifts the other man’s face until he can see into those eyes, blue pools reflecting too many questions in the silver light. Beyond the confusion, the confusion that’s all Clark’s fault, Lex looks like he’s fighting with himself.
Clark rends his hand away. Fuck, but it’s that touch that lingers, the shape of Lex’s jawbone and the feel of his skin burned into Clark’s fingerprints like an unmistakable signature.
Lex tries for words for a while, before he says, “Like I said. Don’t give up on me yet.”
The words set off an impossible bloom of hope in Clark’s chest, that Lex is already the man he thinks he can be, that he doesn’t need the kind of transformation Lionel did, that whoever ends up with Lex will be lucky to have him after all.
“I should go,” is what numbly exits Clark’s mouth.
Lex just nods, like he expects it. It makes Clark wish that there was anything that could hit him and actually hurt this Kryptonian frame, but he runs anyway.
*
Clark can’t forget the look on Lex’s face, the feel of him. Can’t help imagining what it would look like if Lex surrendered to the touch instead of pushing whatever his response to it was down, what it would feel like to hold more of him. Nothing crazy. His shoulder, maybe. Clasping his sides close in a tight hug. Clark’s hands over his hands. The knobs of his knees and the back of his calves. Th-thighs –
Clark shakes himself, scribbling violently over the past line of entirely errant algebra homework. He’s meant to be helping his friend, not thinking about touching him for his own selfish…whatever it was.
Comfort. Closeness. Clark could give that to him, couldn’t he? Or was it a special kind of comfort that you only got from sex? There was so much he had neglected to ask, now he thought about it. Or maybe it was the sort of thing you knew intuitively once you were grown up. Or once you’d felt it.
God, what would it feel like? With Lex? The way he’d talked about it made it seem like he hadn’t been horrible to the women in bed, only after. That went back to what Clark had always thought: Lex would be good in bed. Probably knew exactly the right amounts of pressure to apply, the right amount of softness. He wondered how Lex had gotten into bed with those women. How Lex would seduce someone, if he really wanted them.
It wasn’t like it was only Clark that thought those things about Lex. Everyone could tell from looking at him. The way he walked, talked, dressed. His aura just had a touch of sex about it. He’d never exactly asked anyone, but he was sure all the girls thought so too.
All the girls, and Clark. His best friend. Hmm. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an error 404 was popping up. Did other best friends think of each other that way?
But really, he couldn’t trust anyone else to give Lex what he needed. People either judged Lex without getting to know him or they sucked up to him to get what he could give them, then hurt him, sometimes fatally. Clark needs to be as close as possible so that he could protect him. He couldn’t set him up with someone else.
Did it have to be sex? He still wasn’t sure. But he figured, if he was wrong, he could just pretend he’d only meant to extend an offer of platonic comfort and closeness. Lex needed someone. If Clark had to keep hearing about his great and all-important destiny, he was sure it meant he could at least be that someone. How hard could it be? Forget that, stupid question. Anyway, if it meant he got his knuckles knotted with Lex’s along the way, so much the better.
If he takes you up on it, you might be doing a lot more than holding his hand.
Clark swallows, leaning back on the sofa in the barn loft and trying for some shut-eye. It couldn’t be so bad, he reasoned. People talk about sex like it’s the best thing ever, like it’s Christmas morning. And Lex would be good at it, and Lex is his friend already…it wouldn’t be so strange. He’s seen Lex’s lean frame, damp with sweat after sessions boxing in the gym, has seen the grace he manoeuvres with fencing. It’s not such a bad body to…get intimate with. He already knows the shape of Lex’s lips from when he smiles, laughs, frowns. Would it be so different to touch them with his own lips? Of course, there’s more, there’s things Clark’s never done. Ways he doesn’t know Lex. Under his clothes.
If Lex lets Clark help him – he’d be…touching him. Everywhere. Touching Lex’s dick. For a moment after the visual hits him, there’s nothing else in his mind, just a raw static. Well, it couldn’t be so different from touching himself. Without realizing it, Clark’s started pressing his palm into his crotch, like he can stop the sudden rush of hot blood that’s promising to get him hard in record time. He wouldn’t just be touching Lex with his hand. He might even be…sinking to his knees. Taking it in his mouth. That he doesn’t know so much about. He’d heard the girls saying it could make you gag, if you weren’t careful. Clark didn’t know what careful entailed, so he probably would end up gagging. On his knees. For Lex. On Lex.
What would Lex look like? Sound like? He should be as prepared as possible, should think through all scenarios. He doesn’t want to let his friend down. With urgent, pressured breaths he undoes his jeans and draws himself out, the dry warmth of his palm proving to be greater relief than it should’ve been. God, it had taken all of three seconds for him to get this turned on. It must be adrenaline.
Lex didn’t do anything by half measures. God, would he let Lex fuck him? Or would he have to fuck Lex, to save him? No, for it to work he would have to fuck Lex, that’s right. Hmm. Lex bent over the pool table. Bent over that stupid glossy desk, scattering all the stupid papers that demanded his attention. Clark strained to not make a noise as he squeezed and jerked himself faster.
But maybe before they got to that, Lex would ask to fuck him. That closeness. He was offering to give Lex something, Lex didn’t know there were strings, intentions. Lex might have his own desires. Would Clark let him push inside, somewhere he’d never even put his own fingers? God, he would, anything to put himself in the place of those nameless women that somehow got to touch Lex before he did, in way he didn’t know how to ask for, anything to get Lex where he should’ve been all along, with Clark –
Clark shot hot spurts of come all over his fist and the lower hem of his t-shirt, a small groan escaping him. The pleasure zinged through him without a warning, and left him reverberating with it, with the image of Lex over him. He blinked, in shock.
That couldn’t be…he probably fell asleep earlier. This might be a strange dream his subconscious had cooked up. After all, jerking off had never felt like that before. He couldn’t have consciously fantasized about sex with Lex. And there was no reason it had to interfere with the plan: saving Lex was the only thing that mattered. His breathing runs surprisingly ragged for a dream. Tucking himself back in his jeans, mind bent and exhausted, Clark Kent drifts off to sleep for real.
*
It's twilight when Clark and Lex get back to the mansion from an after-school drive in the convertible. Clark’s hair is tousled from the wind, and Lex looks beautifully unaware of the outside world. Clark wishes he could paint him like that, and never show him, so he never knows to start maintaining appearances more strictly.
“Last game of pool before you head home?” Lex asks.
“Sure,” Clark answers. When Lex bends over, making sure the balls racked in the plastic triangle are even, he says, “Actually, no.”
Clark walks behind his friend, brushing too closely over his back. “I was thinking about what you said the other night, Lex.” With enough adrenaline to launch a rocket burning straight down through his gut, he wraps an arm around Lex, placing his hand down on the green felt on the inside of Lex’s wrist. Lex’s breath is caught in his throat. Clark tries to remember everything he knows about not spooking horses. “You deserve to have that, you know. Everyone does. And I –” oh no. a distinct flutter in the carefully honed steel timbre of his voice. “I want to give it to you.”
He can hear Lex’s heart thudding, escalating so fast that if it continued at its present rate, it could break the sound barrier in mere moments.
Gingerly, Lex turns around, Clark’s hands resting on either side of him on the pool table. Their faces are barely inches apart.
“Clark?” Lex asks hesitantly.
And that’s so much worse than anything he could’ve pictured Lex saying. Because Clark hasn’t planned anything to say next. He takes a deep breath while he desperately searches for any mental guidance, wishing he could superspeed through his memories. He thinks of his dad saying, ‘Actions speak louder than words. Be a man of action if you can be anything, son.’
Man of action, man of action. Lex’s mouth is too intimidating, perfectly formed like a breathing, quavering marble statue. Besides, remember the plausible deniability. He falls around Lex instead, wrapping his arms around him, pressing their bodies entirely together. His hand slots into the curve above Lex’s hip, his elbow hooks around his ribs. Lex’s head leans against his neck, letting him feel his breath push out and recede, spreading across the skin there like morning dew. If he’s not careful, he’s going to start trembling. He’s never felt this much of Lex all at once. Lex’s legs push against his, like he had no balance of his own. Clark wants to feel it, wants to take all of Lex’s weight.
“Let me take your troubles away,” he wants to say.
Except – oh no. He has said it. Out loud.
Lex rears back, the delicate chain of reciprocal balances they’d established disrupted in an instant. Like dominoes, Clark thinks bitterly. There’s a curious desperation in the other man’s gaze, though, instead of the revulsion or mocking pity he’d been afraid to find.
“You don’t know what you’re offering, Clark,” Lex says, a little too smoothly. Like he’s been practicing it in front of the mirror.
Clark closes his eyes. Of course, this is Lex. He’s too smart for any subterfuge a seventeen year old could have invented. Clark never had any plausible deniability.
He places a hand right over Lex’s heart, where maybe he’s always wanted to without knowing it. “Of course I do.”
Lex shakes his head once, twice. A third jerk aborted halfway through. “No, you don’t. And you’re too young. You know that.”
“I deal with freaks and legends and things falling apart every other week. You’re really going to pull that card on me? People die at an awful rate around here, Lex. I see it all. I’m in the trenches with it. Don’t tell me I’m not old enough.” Clark feels his eyes burning, but it isn’t his heat vision, it’s tears.
“There’s a difference,” Lex claims.
“What is the difference? Can you spell it out?” Clark means to challenge him, but when he steps forward he only succeeds in placing his leg between both of Lex’s, who’s nostrils flare. Realizing the compromising position he’s put them in, Clark swallows. Don’t-get-hard-don’t-get-hard-don’t-
“You’re my only friend, Clark. I’m not willing to lose you. Can’t weather it, maybe.” Lex’s sheer honesty seems to have cut him straight down the middle and left him hanging like meat off the bone.
The pit is back in Clark’s stomach. It’s yawning, stretching out, sharpening its claws. back in Clark’s stomach.
“Why the hell would you lose me?” Clark voice ring’s out angry and ashamed.
Lex is backing away, and it’s like all the cold air in the room is rushing to the places they touched. Clark can’t stand it.
“God, Clark. They could fill books with the things you don’t understand.” Lex’s words settle on the ground like fresh-fallen snow that muffles all that comes after it.
“Right. Fine.” Clark tears his eyes off Lex and somehow manages to make his way to the stairs by the door. “But notice how you’re not even trying to say you don’t want it. What were you saying about Lawrence being a homosexual?”
The tiny peek of Lex he dares himself to take before leaving guts him. Lex looks stunned, like all the wind has been knocked clean out of his sails. Dear God, don’t let him sink.
*
Clark hates that Lex thinks he would hurt him. He hates that Lex may have a point. That was the only way to interpret it, right? If he’s worried about him and Clark getting involved, and losing the friendship, he thinks Clark would leave him. He’s disappointed that Lex is applying his own logic: he thinks Clark would be the kind of lover that he is a friend. Prone to fits of retribution and abandonment.
But Lex still needs someone. More than ever. Clark can feel the gaping hole he’s torn while trying to stitch things up, and he has to think of something. Has to find some way to show Lex he understands and prove that he won’t hurt him.
Can he know that for sure, though? Maybe Lex is right to be cautious. In matters of the heart, is anything ever really guaranteed?
Clark’s slipped the tiniest sliver of kryptonite into the coin pocket of his jeans, and he’s resolutely ignoring the waves of nausea it sends up his spine. He wants to feel the ache of baling the hay, this time. Wants to knock his thumb with the hammer by accident and stumble into bed tired and able to really sleep at the end of the day.
Unfortunately, God hates him. He recognizes the exhaust shutting off and the familiar footsteps shuffling up the gravel drive before he has a chance to compose himself even slightly. He’s sweating and dirty when Lex crosses the threshold of the barn.
“Hey, Clark,” Lex tries.
“Hi.”
“I didn’t see your parents’ car outside. Are they out?”
Sure, talk about anything normal. Unless it wasn’t a normal question. Strains of Bruce Springsteen’s song filter through Clark’s mind: hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go and leave you all alone? “They went on a supply run to Metropolis, and my Mom wanted to see the new butterfly house.”
“How unexpectedly sweet,” Lex remarked.
“You can come in, you know,” Clark says, brash even when he doesn’t mean to be.
Lex hums, but stays hovering just outside the door.
Clark hangs his head. “Why are you here?”
“I just wanted to clear the air.”
“I’m sorry,” Clark offers, but it’s a half truth.
“For which part? Or just all of it?”
Lex is giving him the easy way out. He doesn’t take it.
“The last part. That was…unkind of me.”
Lex nods.
“Aren’t you going to say sorry for anything?” Clark can’t believe the things that he keeps hearing come out of his mouth.
“Me?” Lex has assumed the startled appearance of helpless prey.
Clark stalks recklessly closer. He stops just on the other side of the door jam, wiping his hands with a white cloth. “Why would you think you’d lose me? Why would you think I’d hurt you?”
When Lex’s expression remains implacable, Clark carries on, “You’re on every soapbox about giving you another chance, but how about you not giving up on me? How about I can do better, I would’ve done better, if I’d known how you felt?”
“How I felt.” Lex is suddenly far past prey: he’s the corpse lying on the grass in the aftermath.
“That you wouldn’t mind dying, Lex.” Clark presses.
“Oh, that.” The ghost of a smile visits Lex’s perfect lips. “I’m…flattered by your indignation, Clark. But none of that is what I meant.”
Clark feels the floor sink away from under him. Oh God. Lex is right. They really can fill books with the things he doesn’t understand. “Please tell me,” he urges.
“I’d ruin it, Clark. I…” Lex runs a hand over his bare scalp. “I couldn’t just be intimate with you. I have…real feelings for you. I’d get possessive, I know I would. We’re better as friends. I mean, at least you like me as a friend. You don’t even know what I’d be like, if I was with you like that. I’m not sure I do either. I’ve never…with anyone I really…I mean, hell, is that even what you want, or is it just what you think I need? Because I’ve made quite the lifelong habit of refusing charitable handouts, and I have no intention of starting now.”
Christ. Is that even what you want. Oh, how he wants.
Clark Kent has done a lot of thinking over the past week. Beyond that unfortunately all-too-awake fantasy up in the barn, a fire had spread through Clark ever since that night at the mansion. What had started wearing at least the disguise of a misguided errand to save his friend had turned into the sweetest brand of personal torment. He wanted in ways he hadn’t known it was possible to want, ways he had to wonder if the humans around him could even experience.
Clark wanted to be in the place of every woman Lex had had one night stands with, in Helen’s place, and he wants to be better than all of them, wants to burn them all out of Lex’s memory, because he’s Lex’s best friend, because he really cares. He wants Lex to tell him they could never compare to what they have. He doesn’t want Lex to marry some other girl. He doesn’t want Lex slipping out of hotel rooms alone, keycard up his sleeve in the hallway. He wants to wake up next to Lex in the mansion in the morning light and know Lex would fight to stay alive, if it came to that.
He doesn’t want the imagined version. Even if he has no idea what it’ll be like, he wants the real thing.
“It’s.” Clark gets out, because did Lex just say he had feelings for him? Then nothing. A fly might buzz into his mouth before he finds the courage to speak.
Lex laughs again. “Right. That’s what I thought. We might need to have a word about boundaries. I know you have this whole messiah complex going on, but really, it bears further –”
“It is what I want.” The words fall out of him in one fast glut.
Lex blinks, eyelashes fluttering. “No,” he says, soft but sure like he’s correcting a mistake on Clark’s homework.
“No?!” Clark thinks steam might start coming out of his ears soon.
“It’s always going to circle back to you not knowing what you’re asking for, Clark,” Lex says, a sad resolve spiked through the words.
“So let me learn, god damn it.” Clark grits out before falling to his knees. He reaches out, hands landing on Lex’s knees before skating higher up his quads. He feels like he’s being beamed through with holy light. And this is through slacks.
There’s no describing the way Lex looks at him.
For good measure – always press a winning streak to your advantage – Clark tells a whole truth. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, Lex. A-and, it took me a long while to realize it. If you turn me down right now, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live with it.”
Clark can identify each individual pant of Lex’s breath. Waiting for a reply. Lex’s pupils are blown wide, and he’s getting hard inches above Clark’s hands, but his face is shot through with a vulnerable hope, looks like he’s about to witness a miracle he’d been praying for. Maybe he was.
“Okay, okay.”
Clark thought those were his two favourite words in the English language. Err, one.
“But for Christ’s sake, get up off the floor, would you?”
Clark rises up, ungainly and all too fast. He steadies himself with a hand on Lex’s shoulder. Fuck, and that’s his collarbone. He runs his thumb over the contour, rubbing through the silk fabric. Other hand. He moves it like an automaton, one piece at a time. Cupping Lex’s face, curling around his jaw, caressing his cheekbone. Puzzle pieces, if you think about it. Then he crashes their mouths together.
He's always been afraid of heights. But maybe he’s not so afraid of flying.
It’s messy, and wet, and Clark thinks he could spend eternity mapping out every space in Lex’s mouth with his tongue, even his teeth. Clark feels an involuntary moan tearing out of the back of his throat and he can’t even find the decency to be embarrassed about it. Nothing has ever felt this good. Lex softens and deepens the kiss, effortlessly following Clark’s rhythm but flickering sweet little hints with his lips and body. Of course he’s a good kisser. Clark’s going to make him teach him everything he knows so he can use it on Lex. Lex’s arms wrap around his back and waist, and he can feel the heartbeats echoing between both their chests. He’s in heaven. He’s home.
When they break away to gasp in exhilarated breaths, Lex asks, “You…too?”
“Me too,” Clark nods with a grin.
Lex’s answering smile is like the dawn. Clark vows never to dim it. Saving, fixing. Those quests are too big, and wrong in their conceptions. Comfort, closeness, though. That’s something they can start with. He fiddles with the button at the top of Lex’s shirt before slipping it open. Clark Kent knows a lot of things, but he’s never been more excited to be naïve.