Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex sighed and propped his head up on a fist as he stared down at his workbook and wiggled his pencil between his fingers. He really wasn't enjoying this set of problems. --Why had he decided to take this course, again?

He winced and nearly smacked face-first down into his music lab notes at the weight that hit his head from behind. He scowled and shoved the pillow away from the back of his skull, straightening. He twisted in place to glare behind him.

His younger brother peered up at him innocently over the back of the couch in the hayloft.

Lex took in a breath and let it out in a deep open-mouthed sigh, shoulders sagging.

Then he scooped up the pillow and tossed it back at Clark's head -- hard.

Clark let out a whoop of laughter and ducked. There was a mad scrambling for a moment before Clark bobbed right back up again, trusty dusty pillow in hand. Lex, however, had casually reached back behind him during this lull and had a fistful of couch cushion ready to backhand at-will. And Lex waited with intent and a mischevious glint in his eye as his younger and less-tactically inclined brother grinned and jumped up, bringing his pillow up overhead in an unguarded two-handed strike to--

"Boys!"

Clark froze where he was at the sound of his mom's voice, pillow held over his head, as did Lex, who had already had his own cushion halfway to Clark's lower abdomen for a good, solid comeback poke. Both their heads turned in unison towards the sliding door at the other end of the barn.

"Dinner's ready!"

Lex pursed his lips and glanced back up at Clark.

Clark got a small little smile of the evil-brother variety.

Lex sighed, because somebody had to be the responsible one, and Clark was forgetting. Again. "Drop it, you. It's dinner," Lex informed him coldly. You know what that means... went unsaid.

The mealtime Cold War was in effect, or, rather, the Cold Mealtime Rule -- 'avoid cold mealtimes at all costs or risk losing dessert privileges,' that is. Because dinner didn't start without everybody on the premises present, by writ of Mom.

Clark pouted, then bit his lip when Lex's only response to this was to narrow his eyes at him.

They slowly lowered their respective pillow and cushion, but both boys kept their eyes glued to each other as they did so. --Technically, neither of them were in the house, yet, and thus fairgame for comebacks, and return-comebacks, and so on.

Eventually, both of them had their hands back at their sides. They stared at each other tensely for a few long moments.

With stalemate finally achieved, Clark dropped his own pillow and bounded down the loft stairs while Lex scooped up his books and papers in an organized mess before swiftly sliding them into his backpack. He shouldered it as he glanced out the loft window and got to his feet -- god, was it really that late already? ...Well, yes. Mom never made dinner late, or early, or any other time, really.

Lex blew out another breath and shook his head.

He ran a hand over his head absently as he trekked down the stairs after his younger -- and much more energetic -- baby brother, wondering, When am I going to get all my homework done tonight?

~*~*~*~*~*~

"How's your homework coming, son?" his father asked gruffly.

"Fine," Lex muttered as he half-heartedly stabbed at his chicken, distracted by his own internal thoughts, while staffs and measures hardly constrained the notes that danced behind his eyes, both out of rhythm and out of tune. ...It was more of a stagger, really.

"All done, then?"

The tone of his voice had Lex looking up, and as Lex did so, wondering how his dad had picked up on his mood so easily, he realized that it was because he had been frowning slightly to himself.

Lex wiped the look off of his face and checked his posture, too, realigning his spine to be less of a hunched-back and more of a casual sprawl. He kept forgetting to do that. But being the cool college-bound older brother was a duty--

Clark snickered to his left.

--and a chore. Lex forced himself to smile pleasantly at his dad instead of glowering at Clark and making him eat that snicker like he really really wanted to. Pesky younger brothers.

"It's almost done," he said, and then had to talk over another snicker from the Annoying One, raising his voice to say, loftily and hardly put-upon in the least: "It'd go a lot faster if I wasn't getting interrupted so often, though."

Mom brought her head up at that to look across the table at her younger son with no small consternation.

Clark shut up so hard Lex swore people probably heard it in China.

Vengeance is mine! Lex stifled a wide grin, ducking his head back down to stare at his dinner, which was suddenly looking a lot more appetizing. Imagine that.

"Clark, we've told you not to pester your brother when he's--" their dad began.

"--But he's been working for hours!" Clark whined, then crossed his arms. "He needed a break."

Lex now found himself stifling an eyeroll. Clark might get a hell of a lot of mileage out of that once he figured out how to sound as authoritative as mom did when he tried that. If he ever figured it out. (...And if maybe his voice didn't squeak and crack its way through three registers while he did it. Heh.)

That day was not today, though, and Lex got to eat his dinner in silence -- well, without further pestering of him, anyway -- as mom and dad double-teamed The Brat over his rudeness and interruption of Lex's Very Important Studies. As far as Lex could tell from listening with half-an-ear while he was munching away, this time Clark's argument was that Lex had been studying in the loft, and so that must have made him fair game, because if he'd really wanted to get his work done without being interrupted, he wouldn't have done it there, because doing it there meant he must've wanted to be interrupted.

Lex suppressed another eyeroll at the circular reasoning and wondered dourly if the rest of this year of college was going to be like this for him. So far, over the last two years, places where he was apparently 'okay with being interrupted' were: the house (and every room therein -- yes, three-times-over), the outside front porch (after being driven out of the house by Clark's ever-growing antics), the fenceposts over by the back-forty (a good place for art sketching, though not so much when Clark was around), the town library (Clark tended to get away with a lot more with the town librarians than with mom, unbelievably), the school library (not that Clark was supposed to be allowed on-campus like that), anybody else's house (yes, Lex had gotten that desperate at times) ...and now even the loft -- which was supposed to be his Fortress of Solitude from bratty little brothers, not Clark's playplace, thank-you-very-much.

I guess it's probably a good thing that I'll be graduating in three years instead of four, Lex thought to himself as he downed another forkful of mashed potatoes. Well, assuming that I don't fail this stupid music course, anyway, ...or anything else during that or the next semester. It was supposed to have been an 'easy A.'

Yeah, 'easy A' my--

"What were you working on, honey? Is it going well?"

...It was times like this that Lex wished that his personality was more suited to noncommittal grunts.

He shrugged one shoulder at his mother instead.

His mom sighed and shook her head.

Lex internally cringed and tried to forestall a countdown to epic verbal meltdown and otherwise frantic babbling on his part by admitting, "...The music class is turning out harder than I thought it would be."

He clamped down his teeth on anything else, mainly because anything else would be unhelpful and guilt-inducing and stressful all around. Focusing on the good: he could sight-read and play at-speed, and he even had enough of an ear that he could copy down the music he heard to paper just fine. But that was the problem, really. He did it all by-ear. Literally. He had to hear it out as he went -- out loud. He was fine once he sat himself down in front of a darned piano and could bang things out, twiddle out tunes to try them. But if he couldn't do that...

The problem with his homework was that he really needed a piano to work out the melodies for his compositions. He just wasn't good enough to hear it all in his head together and write it down straight-out. Properly. Instead, it just got all snarled up and tangled and messed up in his brain when he tried. He just couldn't hear it right without playing it out. And they didn't have a piano for him to do that with.

They didn't have the money to buy a piano for him to work with, either -- especially not one that would be decent enough to help. Hell, they didn't even have the space to put one, to begin with. Worse, he didn't know anybody with a piano, the music school consistently had most -- if not all -- of the rooms he might be able to use already booked out solid for the hours that he was able to spend on-campus, and...

He didn't have the heart to tell his parents how they could make it better, because they couldn't.

So he kept quiet and gave his mom a self-deprecating smirk so she wouldn't worry about it. And he got a hand-pat and an unpained smile from his mom for his trouble. And a, "I'm sure you'll do fine," that made the knot in the bottom of his stomach clench just a little bit tighter down there.

Lex managed to keep up the 'cool-elderly-brother' front through dessert (which helped) and dishwashing (which didn't; seriously, Clark was a brat), and only after he made it in his room and closed the door shut behind him did he let the ghost of a smile he was maintaining fall off of his face.

He let his back fall against the closed door and, sagging there, he turned his head to stare down at his bookbag, sitting so innocuously by his desk, yet full of evil, evil, unfinished music composition class homework.

He grimaced, then straightened and blew out a breath in consternation as he passed a hand over his head again.

...Screw it. He walked the two feet over to his bed and collapsed across it, face-first.

He lay there dead-ly for a while, then kicked off his shoes and, grumbling to himself, crawled his way up the bed to bury his face in his pillow.

...Not liking the feeling of shallow breathing -- not that he ever had -- he only held the position for a few seconds before he rolled over to stare up at his ceiling, arms dangling half off of the sides. The cream-colored paint above him was still decorated with a layer of glow-stickers from his twelfth birthday party, when Clark had decided that Lex's ceiling was suffering from an 'extreme dearth' of 'night-sky-ness.' He had the fall constellations mapped out from corner to corner in barely visible while-yellow glory, that now glowed only a very faint green in the dark and, admittedly, really did kind of resemble the night sky somewhat after eight years of fading and fading away, if one ignored the color of the night-time glowing-in-the-dark itself.

Clark had put them up because he liked stargazing with dad and he'd spent a lot of time in Lex's room as it was, and because Lex was the older brother he stoically put up with it all. And he'd helped Clark put them up, too.

He could close his eyes and still remember standing on that stepstool, hands around Clark's waist to lift the little guy up to place them, oh-so-carefully, one at a time. It had taken the whole afternoon and well into the evening, first with the sketching and then with the planning, and finally with the actually doing; they'd both been exhausted afterwards.

Clark had loved it. Lex had gotten used to it.

He'd also gotten used to Clark sleeping in his bed more often than not. Until he didn't. ...And then Lex had gotten used to that, too.

Except when he changed his mind and Lex got an unexpected roommate again for a couple days at a time.

Clark still needed to learn a little more about boundaries.

There was a knock on his door, and Lex hadn't even decided whether he wanted to respond yet before Clark barged in.

...Case in point.

"Lex--"

Lex rolled over, showing Clark his back.

Clark huffed out a breath in little-brother annoyance and dropped onto the side of Lex's bed.

Lex felt the wave-like motion travel across the mattress and jiggle him around, and wondered for the four-hundred-and-thirty-fifth time counting when exactly he'd gotten a waterbed, except he knew the answer to that was never. Maybe a firmer box-springs would help? But he doubted it. This had been a problem for a lot longer than they'd had the money to replace it (and had), and would probably continue to be a problem until he finally trained Clark to stop doing that.

"What do you want, Clark?" Lex said tiredly.

"You know you weren't getting anywhere," Clark said, in true-to-form annoying-little-brother fashion.

Lex sighed, loud and long. Trust Clark to notice what he was or wasn't getting done, and how long he stared at a mostly blank page, or erased and rewrote stuff over and over again, or tore up pages and stuffed them down into the bottom of his bookbag in sheer frustration (even if it was just that one time). Annoying too-perceptive little brat of a brother.

So Lex had no choice but to roll over and look up at him with his own brand of annoyance and say, "Well, what do you suggest I do -- give up?"

"No," said Clark, sounding more annoyed than he had any right to be. "I expect you to teach me." ...And there was the side-poke. Clark was nothing if not consistent.

Lex squirmed away from Clark a little bit, then tossed his arms up over his head to cover his face. "Teach you what," he mumbled flatly through his arms, more than asked.

"Teach me how to read music." With... a lack of another side-poke. Huh?

Lex moved one arm down marginally to uncover an eye -- enough to frown up at his little brother, who usually made more sense than this. "...Why?" Because now this had all the earmarks of a Clark-wanting-to-help-Lex episode, sure, but how would Lex teaching Clark that help him?

Clark sighed a put-upon sigh and resituated himself on the side of Lex's bed, provoking another rolling wave-ish motion with his bounciness. "Because I can't help you if you don't teach me how to read music!"

Lex brought down both arms to cross his chest and gave Clark his patented 'you're not making any sense again' look.

Clark rolled his eyes. "If you teach me how to read music, I can make the sounds."

"Yes, Clark. That's generally what writing down music is for--" Lex drawled out, but he broke off as Clark's face squinched up in utter frustration.

Lex waited.

"But if I sing--"

Lex winced at the thought, visibly. "You can't sing." Clark couldn't sing -- he was painfully unable to do so -- and everybody in their family knew that, even Clark. ...And Clark was still looking frustrated, but not in the 'thwarted' way. It was still in the can't-express-myself-properly way.

"Clark, what are you wanting to do?" Lex tried, tilting his head to stare up at him. If there was one thing he knew about his brother, it was that he was a lot better at figuring out and explaining the outcomes he wanted than in actually getting there.

Clark frowned, then said in a rush, "If you write out music, I can make the sounds for you to hear them."

Lex blinked at this.

Then he slowly levered himself up, staring at Clark. "You can make piano noises?" He knew Clark could do birdsong, and traffic sounds, and all sorts of other random effects, as they'd found out over the years, but... musical instruments? Really? When he couldn't even sing?

Clark looked a little jittery, though, which could be either a yes or a no, depending.

Lex gave him a long look, unsure whether he wanted to risk his ears, then straightened in place on the bed and frowned at Clark.

"Show me," he commanded.

Clark drew in a small breath, then bit his lip, opened his mouth, and sounded out a few notes of...

Lex listened intently. ...is that Amazing Grace?

"--Stop," Lex told him, and Clark did immediately, looking even more nervous.

Lex eyed him as Clark gave a slow wince and squirmed under his gaze, then he finally blew out a breath and ran a hand over his head.

"Well, you certainly sounded like a piano," Lex told him, and slowly gave a quirky smile in return when Clark immediately brightened at the confirming praise. He loosely pulled his legs up to his chest and dropped his head onto his knees, listening as Clark babbled away next to him, as his little brother excitedly related when and where he'd heard the piano he'd mimicked, and who had been playing it, and how he'd liked listening in, and how he'd first gotten the idea for mimicking music noises when he'd accidentally stayed a little late and overheard some of the a capella group that had come in after to practice just that once...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex sighed as he dropped down onto the sofa in the Fortress and let his bookbag hit the floor at his feet. It was Friday, almost the weekend, and he had a few minutes before he needed to start helping out with the cows. He wasn't going to waste them.

He lay there for a few long moments that felt almost like minutes, then with a long low groan that belied his young age, he 'painfully' leaned forward and started unzipping his backpack to carefully extract a copy of the latest Warrior Angel comic book. He smiled to himself in pure satisfaction as he plopped back into the couch cushions again, comic book in hands, just letting himself revel in the fact that he had the latest one, that he was keeping up with his longtime passion still. --He'd deserved a treat to reward himself, he thought, given how the day had gone.

He hadn't been able to take advantage of Clark's offer of piano-sounds help yet -- that would require some doing -- but with Clark's out-of-the-box thinking to spark him off last night, he had come up with an alternative that had worked out just fine: that morning, he'd bribed his way into a piano room at an early-hour to get himself that much-needed piano time (to finish off his latest assignment, anyway), and thank god that his mom had taught him how to cook. ...Though Lex was beginning to wonder if he was starting to get the mistaken(?) impression that girls would do just about anything for cookies -- the young opera singer and her lovely pianist had certainly seemed more than willing to let him do what he'd asked for just a few dozen chocolate chip and a very polite '...please?'

Lex thought about it a moment. ...Nah. He shook his head to himself. It was probably just the politeness. Mom had always said that that went a long way, especially with baked goods and fresh cold milk.

They'd just stood off to the side and munched down for a bit, then sat down and quietly chatted casually with each other in the corner over their own practice score-piece for the twenty minutes or so he'd needed to get his homework figured out -- not quite half their session-time -- and they had said that they'd needed the break anyway. He'd gotten his homework done just fine... this time. But it was likely that he'd just gotten lucky that one time. ...and that only meant that he shouldn't rely on being able to bribe his way into another already-booked session the next time he had a homework assignment due -- not if he could help it. Clark would have to learn and learn fast for Lex to avoid a worst-case of a lousy turned-in sheet of 'music' for that class -- Lex would need to get on that, post-haste.

He'd have to try and find an excuse to take Clark in to campus on the weekends, though, to get him to a piano where he could teach him -- trying to find a time when he could 'take over' one of the pianos at the middle school where Clark had been listening just wouldn't work out -- or he'd find himself explaning the real reason why he needed Clark with him. ...Oh, who was he kidding, he could just say that Clark demanded to tag along and he'd had to give in. That happened often enough as it was; their parents wouldn't think twice about it.

Lex tapped his fingers lightly against his leg as he tilted his head back and stared up into the rafters. ...No, that probably wasn't a good idea. That'd get Clark in trouble a bit when he really wouldn't deserve it, since it'd happen when he was doing a favor for Lex. And Lex usually rode his 'bike in to campus. If he wanted Clark's help, he'd probably have to let him ride in back with him, which would likely set a bad precedent. Dad had enough trouble keeping Clark away from his motorcycle already; if Lex let Clark start riding his electric bike with him...

Well, that Clark didn't think it was a bike was actually the main issue there. Clark thought it was basically a futuristic motorcycle and as cool as cool could be ...which it kind of was, and Lex was really proud of it and liked that his brother thought of it that way, too, because that had been totally what Lex had been going for when he'd built it. ...Except that he really couldn't say that because Clark would do the whole emulate-the-cool-older-brother thing again and get himself into trouble if he did. So while Lex couldn't call it what it really was...

Lex refused to call the electric motorcycle he'd built a 'scooter,' though. He literally shuddered at the thought.

...Well, he'd work something out for getting the both of them to campus, without adult supervision or suspicion for what they were both up to together this time. He always did. He picked up the comic book and held it out in front of him cheerfully. After all, he always thought better after a good W.A. issue, and he'd heard that this one was a doozy!

He quickly pulled it to his chest, then glanced around furtively -- no Clark in sight -- and there really shouldn't've been, since school hadn't quite let out just yet -- and opened up his comic book to bury his nose in it.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"Hey, Lex!"

Lex abruptly fell out of a universe of superheroes and Devilicus' latest plot and back into a more somber reality at the sound of his little brother's voice -- and darn it, he'd been right at the climax of the issue and everything! He whipped his head up to glare furiously at his little brother -- who was also impinging on not only his comic bookery time, but also his Fortress! rrgh! -- and--

...his friend. Who was standing right next to him. And was a girl. Who was decidedly not Lana.

...Huh?

"Who's your friend?" Lex said as he straightened up from his protect-the-comic-book crouch and slowly closed it in his lap, glancing between the two. He'd never seen her before, and he knew all of Clark's friends from over the years. "And why are you up here?" he added, because some things just couldn't go unsaid.

"This is Chloe!" Clark told him. "She just started school here. She's in eighth grade, too, and she wanted to see the farm. --She's from Metropolis!" he grinned.

Lex stifled a rueful sigh. Clark had been on a Metropolis kick since forever-and-a-day, but it'd gotten especially bad lately. He'd used to wonder when Clark would finally look up from the stadium trips he and dad sometimes made for ballgames and actually realize where the heck he was right in the middle of the city. (That had happened last summer, and Lex could name the day and time, even though he hadn't been physically present during the occasion; yes, it had been that bad.) Sometimes Clark's awareness was a bit too overfocused, and kind of blind at the same time. Weird, but very Clark.

...This of course meant that Lex would have to exercise his brotherly duties and vet his 'new friend' for him, since Clark would be patently unable to do so with all the Metropolis sparkliness blinding him completely. So Lex turned his head to her and looked her over, as Clark also turned to her and proclaimed, just as proudly now as he had that first day of show-and-tell at his kindergarden: "This is my brother!"

At such a glowing pronouncement, Lex could not help but smirk a little.

But even with Clark's enthusiasm in the background prompting her, the girl -- Chloe, he reminded himself, because it was both important and polite to remember people's names after the first introduction, so saith his mom -- Chloe was staring at him, looking a little like someone had struck her over the head with a frying pan, hard. Point not in her favor. She'd also spent far too much time in getting her brown hair dyed blonde just right, in his opinion, which was another point against her in Lex's vaunted experience through middle school, high school, and beyond. (Things only got better in college, when the people who had brains sometimes decided that they might feel like branching out and trying weird-and-or-cooler things with their looks, now that they didn't matter so much anymore. When it was okay for geeks to look better than good.)

"Hello," Lex said gamely, mostly ignoring her dumbfounded stare in lieu of his own browbeaten-into-him good manners. "Yes, I am bald and reading a comic book," he added, for the record, as he casually tossed the comic book onto the wooden coffee table in front of him, already not so very impressed with her.

No response. ...Right.

He glanced over at Clark. "Clark, what is she doing in my loft?" he asked in descending tones. Girls Clark was gushing over he would tolerate, but only if they were interesting ...which generally required that they had far more than two brain-cells to rub together.

"She wanted to see the farm," Clark said defensively.

"There's a lot of other farm," Lex said, giving him a look.

"I showed her the other parts."

"Really?" Lex said dubiously. "You hit the cows, the crop fields, the tractor, the back-forty, and the house in... what," he checked his watch, "less than three minutes?"

"The tractor's in here, down there," his little brother pointed out. "And they let school out a little early today," Clark said defensively, crossing his arms.

"By what, thirty minutes?" Lex scoffed, then leveled a glare at his younger brother, who had apparently hit puberty sometime in the last ten hours and suddenly and immediately thereafter developed a bad case of extremely poor taste. Get her out of my loft already!

"--You're Lex Luthor!" the blonde abruptly blurted out, pointing at him rudely.

Lex turned and blinked at her blankly, then couldn't help but make a face, because what-the-who-now?

He turned his head to look at Clark.

Clark was staring at her in just as much confusion as Lex had, then turned to look back at him.

They shared a look, mostly an interchange of what the hell? and how should I know, you're the one who brought her here!

Clark pleaded silently at him with his eyes in true little-brother fashion, and since Clark clearly had no clue how to handle this, Lex sighed and stepped in.

"Uh, I don't know if Clark mentioned this," Lex began slowly, "But this is the Kent Farm." Like on the sign out front. "Kent," he told her, "Okay?" and if this silly little girl was only hanging around Clark because she was under the mistaken impression that they were the Luthors--!

...Actually, it wasn't that funny at all. The Luthors were bad news, and everyone knew it.

"You're--" she said breathlessly, just staring at him with no change in her dopey expression whatsoever, and Lex was starting to feel really weirded out.

"Alexander Kent," he said, as he pushed off of his knees and slowly stood up. "This is the Kent Farm," he emphasized, "and my friends call me Lex." He glanced over at Clark for a moment before looking back at her. "The Luthors have a place in Smallville, sure, but it's at completely the other end of town," he gestured, then he held out his hands away from him slightly and approached her as he would a skittish, possibly-feral small animal -- with no small caution. "It's nice that you think the place is so grand," he said with another loose and all-encompassing gesture, smiling at her ever-so-slightly, before coming to a stop a few feet away. "But it's really no mansion."

The girl stared up at him with suddenly-sharp eyes that raked him over. "I know where the Luthor mansion is. And don't lie to me -- I know who you are! You can't pull a fast one on me," she said acerbically.

Lex blinked down at her, the smile slowly dropping off of his face.

"I'm no Luthor," he said outright, as lightly and well-meaning as he could manage under the circumstances. "And you should probably know, this is Smallville; you're not in Metropolis anymore," he told her. "The name Luthor is practically a curse in these here parts."

"'These here parts,'" Chloe echoed quietly up at him, almost amused, and her expression suddenly shifted. "You... you really don't know, do you?" she breathed out, eyes going wide.

Know what? Lex frowned down at her, his hands slowly dropping.

"I'm not a Luthor," he repeated, with the uncertainty of one who is purposefully facing down a crazy person who is facing them, wondering which of them is the more-than-a-little insane in the attempt.

"You're adopted, aren't you?" she said.

"Nooo," said Lex, drawing it out slowly as he glanced over at Clark, who, well, was, but...

...no, Clark was still staring at Chloe uneasily, still just as confused as Lex was, so it was likely that Clark hadn't brought up his own adoption in her presence. Nothing to explain Chloe's confusion away on that count.

But when he glanced back at Chloe, he felt a startlement almost like a static shock, from the look of pure glee he saw that crossed her face.

His uneasiness increased. Maybe if there had been some malice in the mix there, that would have made sense. Maybe. But...

"Wow," she said. "Wow." Then she started giggling.

"Um," said Clark, starting to tentatively reach towards her.

Chloe shook her head once, twice, and backed two steps away from the two of them. Her head kept swivelling between them.

She started giggling again.

"Um, Chloe, are you..." Clark began, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder with Lex as he stepped up next to him, but he trailed off as she turned on her heel.

The two of them could only stand and watch as she ran down the stairs and out of the barn, starting to laugh. Gleefully. Still.

"...okay? Um. ...Huh," Clark finished saying.

They both stood there for a moment, stunned.

Then Lex frowned, then put his hands on his hips, turned to his brother and gave him a long look.

Clark glanced to his side, then down at his feet, and shuffled them.

"....Sorry about interrupting comic bookery time?" Clark offered meekly, peering up at him slightly.

Lex sighed and shook his head as he let his arms fall to his sides and walked back over to the couch, only to loosen his knees and drop back down onto its cushions once again.

He glanced over at the top of the staircase, where Clark was still standing, then, feeling somewhat exasperated, made an abrupt 'come hither' gesture with one hand. After all, it wasn't as though Clark was going to interrupt him any more than he had already.

With a look of pure relief, Clark bounded over to drop down onto the couch right next to him. --Right up next to him. What else was new?

"So," Lex said after Clark was reasonably settled in and he'd picked his comic book back up. "You need better friends." Because he really didn't have a problem with Clark's dearth of friends -- Lex was all for quality over quantity any day of the week, hands down -- but was it really worth it to let this one slide, with Clark's friend count hovering somewhere around one?

...Oh, wait. That 'one' was Pete Ross. Clark could hardly do any worse with Crazy Fake-Blonde Girl, even if she did mistake him for a Luthor. Nevermind then.

Lex eyed Clark, because he needed better friends. And more of them.

"Leeex," complained Clark, but Lex felt his little brother's wince through his side.

"Don't even," said Lex, turning a page in his comic, looking for where he'd left off. "Crazy. Person." That you brought up to my loft.

"She is not," Clark said defensively.

Lex lowered his comic book for a moment, keeping his place with a thumb, and gave Clark a Look. (Because he knew how mom did it, and the secret wasn't copying mom -- it was making it your own.) --And the girl was totally crazy.

"...Well, maybe just a little," Clark grumbled.

"No kidding," Lex said in the usual 'amen' he gave whenever Clark's friends did stupid stuff and he had to call Clark on it. Or Clark's attention to it, in a brotherly 'learn from other people's experience instead of the hard way' sort of warning. ...It was more 'friendly advice,' really, and Lex had to stifle a snicker at that.

"What?"

"Mm, nothing," Lex said as he started to pick up his comic book, then set it down again, because he really only had two sets of advice for Clark when it came to friends: either get better friends, or fix the ones you have, and...

"Nooooooo," Clark groaned. "I know that look. No medicating my friends!"

"She could use some medicating," Lex informed him primly, half his mind more on trying to diagnose her likely neurochemical imbalances and drugs that would work on them...

...and not so much on his whiney little brother, who was being a bother and interrupting his concentration. Lex absently lifted his hands full of comic book out of the way as Clark slid down his side, dumping his head into his lap.

"Pleeease don't," said Clark, looking up at him from below with the Big Pleading eyes. "You don't have your degree yet anyway; s'not allowed," he was informed.

...Well, technically he needed a doctorate of some sort or a physician's or pharmacist's certificate for that to be legal, but details. Certainly not something he'd be about to bother Clark with. "I plan on doing great things with my biochem degree," he informed Clark.

"That's what I'm worried about," Clark grumped.

"--and there's no reason to not start early, right now," Lex continued as though he hadn't been interrupted. 'Great' versus 'good' was not a topic he was about to let Clark suck him into right now, especially in close proximity to his newest comic book acquisition -- one which he was holding right above Clark's head, no less.

"You already started early," Clark reminded him, then groaned at Lex's grin. "Leeeeex!"

What? So he'd medicated Pete once with a concoction of pureed banana slices, chocolate syrup, coffee, and lime juice. Clark had wanted something to help keep his friend awake at school because he'd been falling asleep in class, and by god it had worked.

Lex had been a highly responsible ten at the time. He was actually very proud of the feat.

"You still owe me three blue pixie stix for that one, you know," Lex reminded him as he smirked smugly down at Clark, that having been his standard fee for 'brotherly help' at the time. "I don't think you ever paid me back for that one."

Clark groaned again. "Why do you always bring that up?"

"Because you keep forgetting to get them when you go to the store."

"I keep forgetting to write it down!"

"That, too."

Clark rolled his eyes.

Lex opened his new comic book as he merrily shook his head at his brother (technically adopted) and then paused for a moment as he finally allowed himself to truly mull over the Chloe-girl's disturbing remarks.

He held his comic book splayed out open against his chest and frowned down at Clark. "What do you think she thought, anyway?" he asked his little brother.

"...That you're a Luthor?" Clark said with a weird 'got me' look.

Lex rolled his eyes. "Yes, Clark. I got that." He felt his brow furrow. "But what I don't understand is why she seemed to think that in the first place ...still, even after being informed she was wrong." Because clearly the girl had not changed her mind before running out of the barn. "Or how she thought that would even be possible at all." He let out a breath in frustration as he lifted his comic book. "What did she think you all did anyway," Lex muttered, "Steal me?"

Clark looked up at him with big eyes. "I would totally steal you," he was informed with perfect seriousness.

Lex huffed out a breath of amusement and freed a hand from his comic book holding to muss Clark's hair up a bit. "You would," he said with a smile. "Stolen Luthor," he murmured, almost half-a-laugh. As if. Wouldn't Luthor have noticed he was missing, or something? Not to mention Nosy Nell and their neighbors? Let alone half the town? And wouldn't everybody else have noticed the sudden addition to the Kent family?

Clark wriggled in place and batted Lex's hand away from his hair, as per usual, and then demanded, "--Is that the new Warrior Angel?"

As if he couldn't tell from barely a foot away. "Yes."

"Do I get to read it, too?" And such prompted the reappearance of Doe-Eyed Little Brother.

Lex rolled his eyes, preparing to fend off impending attack--

...until he realized that Clark was keeping his hands to himself, uncharacteristically. ...Well, uncharacteristically, except for when--

Lex gazed down at Clark. "Your next growth spurt started? Already?"

Clark grimaced. "Don't think so, but I feel a little weird lately."

Lex nodded once. His reluctance was understandable, then. The last time Clark had had a growth spurt and hadn't had full, fine control back yet, they'd tussled over one of Lex's comic books and he'd accidentally torn the thing to shreds. Neither of them had been happy about that -- shocked, had been more like it. Clark had nearly been in tears.

Lex had tried to track his growth spurts to try and predict them, but really the safest, easiest bet, Lex had found, was relying on Clark's own feelings and intuitions. If he thought he was gonna have a growth spurt soon, well...

"...you're about due," Lex said thoughtfully. "I'll help dad wrangle up the camping supplies."

"Think you'll be able to come along on this trip?" Clark immediately asked, sitting up, but Lex shook his head ruefully -- they both knew better. After the last time...

Lex had been ten, Clark four. Lex had been utterly fascinated, and Clark had had a ball.

Their parents had been horrified. Words had been said. Loud, angry words. Even though neither of them had really understood what they had done that had been so wrong.

...and still kind of didn't. It was a little more than ten years later, and Lex was finally starting to get his head around not only the idea of 'experimenting on ...or with! his little brother' being A Bad Thing, but what that actually meant. The 'with' part being the main issue. ...Not that he, well, understood it, really, since what his dad did with Clark on those camping trips (related to Lex by Clark afterwards) didn't seem all that different, or anything, to both their continuing puzzlement all around.

But. Somehow, apparently, it was.

No, Clark hadn't had any problem with it, and Clark hadn't felt uncomfortable or anything -- he'd been having fun! -- and Lex hadn't had any idea that what they'd been doing was wrong, or that they should stop, so Lex hadn't stopped, and Clark had gamely continued doing the stuff Lex thought would be cool and interesting to do, and...

...well, Lex was kind of still a little traumatized from the upset and the yelling that had happened after the fact, even if Clark had bounced back like a... undeflatable basketball, or something. Even now, Lex wasn't about to bring up suggestions for things for Clark to try, only to see his parents get that look on their faces once again. ...Especially not now.

"I really don't want to get yelled at again," Lex told his little brother, trying not to cringe at the thought. Mom stayed home usually during the camping trips now, even though Lex was fully old enough to be home by himself and stay out of trouble on his own. If Lex went along, or managed to sneak along, he'd only have to worry about dad's yelling... at least until he got sent home...

"Leeeeeex..." Clark whined.

Lex gave him a long look. "Do you know when you should tell me to stop?" Long, telling silence. "Then I definitely can't go."

Clark sighed and pouted. "Not fair."

Lex made a face, but silently he agreed.

--really didn't make sense, and they'd both expended a significant amount of brainpower on it at this point. But what it really came down to was that Experimenting on little brothers was Bad, neither of them really 'got it,' and they both trusted their parents.

It might've helped more if they were actually allowed to talk about it. But there was a lot of Clark-stuff that was kind of off-limits, and while all of it had been learned by trial-and-error, to the tune of both yelling and panic, Clark and Lex had learnt their lessons well. Some things just didn't bear repeating.

"Why's it okay in a bathtub when it's all boring and all on my own but not when we do it, anyway?"

Lex blinked at Clark, then shrugged as Clark shoved himself over and snuggled in close. "Dunno." He set the comic book down to one side momentarily and frowned, as he tried to compare the two and what they both already knew.

Lex went by the facts. Facts were best. (No emotion meant no yelling or feeling bad about things.)

Fact: Dad and mom had asked Lex to watch Clark for a bit as he was swimming in the pond. They'd needed to go do something, and Lex had been sitting under a tree not really doing anything anyway, so Lex had put down his book and said 'okay.'

Fact: Clark had been swimming in the pond, and diving down under the surface, and not coming up again for longer and longer periods of time. Lex had gotten worried that Clark might end up drowning himself accidentally before Lex could get to him, because the pond was kind of deep-ish for his four-year-old brother, and Lex couldn't swim that well.

Fact: Clark learning how long he could hold his breath without drowning by holding his breath as long as he could and almost drowning in the pond ...was not a good idea.

It was everything else the other things that was more than a bit murky.

The next time Clark had surfaced again, Lex had yelled Clark over and then told him his concerns. Clark had laughed and had wanted to figure out the holding-his-breath thing swimming around under the surface of the pond, because it was interesting down there on the bottom! Lex had told him no, that that was a bad idea, because he was already getting distracted and forgetting to come up for air as often as other people were supposed to, and if something went wrong then he might drop like a stone or something -- and they had a big No Drowning family policy, and all.

Clark had kind of huffed at him and asked in five-year-old fashion how they'd do it, then, 'cause the pond was the only water around.

Lex, not about to let this dissuade him from water safety rules, had looked around realized that that wasn't really right -- there were a couple streams that fed into the pond, and one of them was something like three feet across.

So they'd both gotten up and walked over to the biggest stream.

Clark had spent about ten seconds face-down in the thing before shoving himself up on his stomach, turning to Lex -- who had been crouching nearby, right there, with his watch, paying really close attention to everything -- and declaring it too completely boring for anything ever.

Lex had frowned at being thwarted in this, but thought about, then tried it himself to see what was so boring about it anyway. He'd realized pretty quickly that staring at dirty sandy streambed underwater for even a minute was kind of dumb, and trying to get Clark to do that for even the five or ten minutes at a time that he'd already been pulling in the pond just wasn't going to cut it. And it wasn't like Lex could make it a contest to hold Clark's attention, either, because he knew he couldn't hold his breath for ten minutes.

But Lex couldn't let Clark just go back to swimming in the pond again without knowing how long Clark could hold his breath, because he was four -- he'd just start diving down deep and forgetting to come up for air when he was supposed to again -- and Lex needed to know when he should start panicking and go diving after his little brother if he didn't see Clark come up for air. He was supposed to be responsible for him. And because Lex needed to know this, Clark needed to do this. So Lex, trying to be a good brother, had hemmed and hawwed and stood there trying to think of a way to make the whole thing fun.

He'd settled on Clark lying down completely submerged in the stream, face-up, while he leaned over from the side bank to make silly faces at Clark from above, because Clark liked it when Lex made silly faces at him.

Except that that didn't work out at all, because the stream was only about two feet deep in even the deepest of deep parts, and Clark kept floating up -- he couldn't keep his head down on his own.

Clark had thought about maybe using rocks or something to hold onto or pile on top of him to keep him down, but Lex had thought that was a bad idea. Neither of them were exactly sure what Clark was and wasn't supposed to be able to pick up, even if Lex could move the same things without help. And yes, Clark could sit up easy from anything Lex might lift over onto him, or simply shove it away, no problem -- but what if somebody saw?

So Lex ended up having to sit on Clark's stomach and lean over him, holding his hands on his shoulders, while Clark braced his arms against the sides of the streambed, to try and keep Clark's nose below the waterline ...while Lex made faces at him, because it still needed to be not-boring.

And then Lex had shortly ended up almost more wet than Clark, at some of Clark's abrupt, and erupting, giggle fits at some of his antics. This consistently had Lex letting go of his little brother at the explosion of water propelled by the airbursts from Clark's mouth, and Clark levering himself up on his elbows to finish his giggling while Lex was wiping his face and sighing because Clark just couldn't keep it together for more than two seconds, really.

This had quickly devolved into Lex 'shoving' Clark down and mussing up Clark's hair underwater and tickling him sometimes (but mostly mussing up his hair, because that usually prompted more giggles), while Clark was trying not to giggle and flail away at every little thing Lex did, and Lex forgetting to check his watch and time things sometimes (not that Clark ever made it to more than a minute anyway), and both of them having waaaay too much fun and almost forgetting why they had been doing any of it in the first place...

...right up until the being-forcibly-grabbed-away-from-each-other and all the screaming and yelling by their completely horrified parents.

Clark hadn't started crying until he'd seen Lex get so scared from the yelling and shaking.

When Lex had panicked, their parents had calmed down, but when Lex had tried to explain... that they'd been doing an experiment to figure out how long Clark could hold his breath without drowning... Well, they'd gotten angry all over again. Up until then, Lex had thought that the scientific method was the Best Thing Ever, and that talking things out and figuring things out was a Good Thing, and telling Clark stuff was an Even Better Thing, especially when it involved teaching and explaining.

But he had been wrong. Experiments Were Bad. Reasons for it? Didn't matter. Clark courageously piping up and tremulously saying he'd actually been enjoying it? Still Bad. And they'd gotten two new Rules that day.

No holding your little brother underwater. No Experimenting on your little brother. Ever. For any reason.

Lex had thought this new information through carefully, and mostly calmly. Then he and Clark had looked at each other, Clark still sniffling a little bit, and Lex had looked his mother in the eye and asked if it was okay for his little brother to hold him underwater.

That had had mom carting Lex home with a hold on his arm that had almost ended up bruising a little, and a lot more not-so-coherent angry words with him afterwards.

(Which had sort of answered Lex's question, he'd thought, because for awhile there he'd thought that maybe his parents had meant anyone, not just Clark. But apparently not.)

Oh, and when their dad had brought Clark back home later that week, and caught Clark and Lex (carefully! why had nobody believed them?) dropping from tree branches the next day into the ground, the shit had really hit the fan.

No Experimenting on or with your little brother. It wasn't okay, even if Lex was doing it, too.

So, yeah. Apparently Lex trying to do the same things as Clark and recording what he was able to do at age ten -- so that Clark could know exactly what he should and shouldn't be able to do later, at least, when he was finally ten -- wasn't okay either.

And it wasn't like they'd been trying to break both their legs or something like their parents had freaked out about -- Lex had been super-careful about it! They'd both started off slow by jumping off of short haystacks and tables in the barn and things, but... well, their parents hadn't wanted to hear it.

And then it had gotten Even More Worse when their parents had found out that, earlier during the camping trip, Lex had had Clark trying to punch boulders (after accidentally running face-first into one and breaking the boulder) and throwing rocks as hard as he could (at pretty much anything Lex could think of in sight) and jumping up and down (next to a tree, so Lex could measure distance-height by the shadows and stuff, and so Clark could grab on if he needed to or anything; they hadn't done much of that, though, because that had made Clark's stomach feel all wobbly). So, yeah. Lex had thought that it was really cool to have a superhero-in-training as a little brother, and Clark had liked being able to do Warrior Angel things. ...except when it resulted in More Angry Yelling about Experiments. Joy.

Mostly, Lex had not tried to have anything to do with Clark's camping trips after that other than seeing his little brother off, even thought Clark wanted him along. And they'd also tried not to Experiment together on the farm either, even though that was kind of dumb and wasted time and was boring as hell. But whatever. Instead, they'd tried to stick to the global, overriding maxim: don't tell anyone, don't let anyone see you, don't let anyone find out what isn't completely normal when it comes to Clark Things outside of the family.

Or, as Lex liked to summarize it more succinctly: Don't Get Caught.

Because that pretty much covered it. Clark could do whatever he wanted on the farm, as long as only the family saw, and everything could be explained away after. (This meant that Clark getting his chores done in five minutes was okay, but planting the entire back-forty on his own was not.) Clark could even run around and through other people's cornfields and stuff, so long as he kept himself far enough out that nobody watching could or would see him.

And, apparently, Clark could time himself holding his breath underwater in a bathtub, too. Which begged the question: what was different?

"Okay, so was it okay because you did it alone and I wasn't there, or because you did it alone and nobody could've seen you, or because it was boring, or... what?" Lex asked him.

"Dad asked if you were there timing me and I said no," Clark told him. "Then he asked if it was your idea, if you came up with it."

Lex felt a little panicky.

"I told him no," Clark said, glancing up at him. But they both knew that that was totally a lie -- Lex had come up with that years ago.

"...And he believed you?" Lex said dubiously, because their parents were usually really good at telling when either of them had lied. Freakishly so.

Clark shrugged. "He said it was okay."

Lex frowned in complete confusion. "When was this?"

"A couple weeks ago."

Great. "So, maybe because you're older it's okay now...?" Lex trailed off at Clark's headshake, then tensed. "You brought up the camping trip again?" he squeaked.

"No, I just asked if it was okay that I did it, or if I'd tried it before, and he said yes, as long as you weren't 'involved' with it."

...Lex's head hurt.

"Okay," said Lex. "Okay. I guess that means... it's me helping out that is the thing that makes it not-okay?"

"I guess," Clark said glumly.

"Great," Lex groaned out in sheer frustration, as he leaned back into the couch cushions.

"I know," Clark groused. "And you always comes up with the best ideas!"

"Well, don't tell that to mom and dad!" Lex hissed at him under his breath. "They'll get the wrong idea, and I don't want to get yelled at again!"

"I won't tell," Clark swore to him.

Lex pulled an unhappy face and tried not to think through the implications of this, except it was kind of hard not to.

"...White lab coats?" Lex said quietly.

Clark shrugged and sighed, because that was their new-ish phrase for 'confusing parents who might actually be wrong?!' more than anything.

Because people in white lab coats were not evil. ...Necessarily. And they did not want to cart Clark away and toss him in a cage and do Bad Things to him For Science (in other words: Experimentation). Lex and Clark even had scientific proof! Notebooks full of it!

That little revelation had come about in the summer before Lex had had to take his first chemistry class for high school science in tenth grade. Both he and Clark had started to worry when they'd heard about the requirement to wear a white lab coat and lab goggles in the class, which had nearly coalesced into a full-blown panic attack after they'd received confirmation from the chemistry teacher himself... once they were home and had realized the full implications of this fact. After all, chemistry was a required course to graduate...

...which meant that everybody who took it and graduated high school had worn white lab coats for...

...which meant that EVERYBODY IN TOWN...

And now Lex was going to have to take it, too. And that was already bad enough. But what would happen when Clark needed to take the class, after him? Would the evilness drive him insane? Would he end up performing Evil Experiments on himself?!?

Lex had been of the rarified opinion that the color of one's clothing should not, in and of itself, make one insane. Nor should the type of material or length or cut of the cloth. Maybe the dye or chemical wash used might have an effect if absorbed through the skin, but Lex had suspected that white lab coats ought not be special in that regard. But the congruence of factors of color, material, pressure-on-skin, and trace chemicals...

Well, they had done research into the textile industry -- as much as they could manage at the local library, anyway -- but they'd both still had that crazy low-level anxiety that just wouldn't go away, no matter how stupid Pete had told them they were being about it, and they'd just felt that they'd needed to be sure...

So Lex had bought a white lab coat early on at the beginning of the summer, a white lab coat of the type that the high school demanded be worn for chemistry class use -- just one, not two, because if the one he got might be a fluke that would be fine, and then Clark could use it, too. Lex hadn't been trying to drive himself evil, after all. And once they'd bought it, they'd hidden it from their parents, and then they'd snuck it over to Pete's house one day in the dead of night.

Pete had (still) thought they were both completely nuts, especially when they couldn't explain why they were both so worried about it -- they weren't allowed to explain because it would have involved explaining part of a Clark Thing and breaking the global maxim. But, luckily -- after some verbal flailing -- Pete had ended up declaring it a 'Kent Thing' and just gone along with it. And so Lex had ended up spending a couple hours a day every day that summer sitting, standing, or walking around the Ross' home wearing the white lab coat, and trying to tell if he was feeling particularly more evil in some way after putting it on.

Pete's parents had been very understanding about the whole matter, though. ...It had probably helped that beforehand, Lex and Clark had sat down with them and explained, very carefully, that they needed to try out an Experiment in their home and under their adult supervision -- that did not involve explosions or anything! -- and, most importantly, that Clark was Experimenting on Lex -- not the other way around! -- so Pete's parents didn't need to tell on them or anything to their parents, because they weren't doing anything wrong. (Since they had never ended up getting yelled at for it, the Ross' must not have passed anything along, and the Kent boys had both cautiously and carefully filed that particular bit of noteworthy information away for a very rainy day.)

They had made notes daily, both Lex on his own internal subjective observations, and Clark's external mostly-objective ones watching him very carefully, while Lex was and was not wearing the white lab coat. But, as far as either of them had been able to tell, Lex had neither turned totally evil -- suddenly, inexplicably, or otherwise -- nor did he want to stuff Clark in a cage any more than he usually did, and maybe even a little less. (The 'wanting to perform experiments on him' bit was inconclusive, though, since neither of them had had a really good idea about what Bad Experiments involved to begin with, anyway.)

(Admittedly, Lex was pretty sure he didn't want to hold Clark down in a stream again anytime soon, but he still thought some of the Warrior Angel-type power things Clark could do were things he'd like to see more of, but they weren't exactly the sort of thing Clark could do best from a cage... it was kind of a wash even before the white lab coat.)

More tellingly, when the school year had rolled around, at one point Lex had timed his laundry-washing wrong, and had to tentatively confess-slash-announce to both their parents out loud in the living room his need to use the washing machine to wash his white lab coat for chemistry class the next day, neither of them had batted an eyelash. In fact, their mom had just stopped the currently-running load in the washer and dumped the coat in with the rest of the whites already in there. Lex had, quite frankly, been stunned, and so had Clark.

Looking back on it all, it had seemed as completely stupid as, well, anything they'd ever done, if not more so. Pete had been totally right: wearing a white lab coat would not make Lex evil. (The jury was technically still out on wearing a white lab coat not making anyone evil, because Pete's little sister had gotten her hands on it once during that summer and had spent the whole day terrorizing the neighborhood, but that might've been coincidence, or maybe only requiring a corollary for temporary evil induced in elementary school girls only, which might explain why chemistry was taught in high school for the safety of all and sundry. ...Even though Pete kept insisting that his little sister was permanently evil, and always had been, which Lex was pretty sure she was not. --She didn't misbehave anymore than Pete ever had at that age, anyway, and hadn't gotten in nearly as much trouble since the Wearing Of The Coat, so it was likely more of a Ross Thing. Needless to say, Lex was going to be keeping an eye on Pete once he hit tenth grade science...)

So, no. White lab coats did not induce evil behavior in people. This was not a problem that should be a cause of concern. --No, the real problem, they'd come to realize, had been that Clark and Lex had worked themselves up over nothing at all -- which hadn't even really made sense at the time when they'd tried thinking it through, even! -- except that their parents had been absolutely adamant about it for years, and had scared them both with incorrect information for no reason.

And their parents didn't even seem to realize that they'd been wrong.

Which had begged the question: what else were their parents wrong about?

Since then, Lex had spent a lot of time trying to think through what they'd both just taken on faith all of those years that their parents had always told them, and he tried to think it all through very carefully. ...And yes, he was still working on it. Clark, not so much -- he was too busy with doing things and not getting caught -- and Lex was fine with that. It was what big brothers were for, after all, as far as he was concerned.

"Lex?" Clark asked him.

"Yes?"

"Um, do you maybe think..." he trailed off.

Lex waited.

"Um. Do you think that maybe, Chloe's stuck on... well, not a White Lab Coats kind of thing, but the Other Thing?" Clark asked, and that suddenly gave Lex pause.

"The Other Thing?" Lex echoed. "Well..."

The Other Thing was sort of the opposite of 'confusing parents who might actually be wrong?!.' Generally, when Lex and Clark were in deep enough trouble that it required parental anger, if they were actually able to explain things, they tended to end up in far less trouble. (Well, at least no more angry-parents, and their not being grounded quite as badly afterwards, anyway.) It was more of a 'we'd probably be having less issues with other people if we weren't having so much trouble trying to explain ourselves' thing -- other peopl and not just parents because, from notable past experience, the not-quite hard-and-fast rule seemed to carry over to other parents, teachers, and adults, as well. (And baked goods as a follow-up 'sorry' also tended to smooth ruffled feathers over even better, too. Sadly, Lex had gotten a lot of practice baking over the years learning just that very thing.)

"She didn't really get a chance to explain," Clark offered.

"She didn't really try to explain," Lex reminded his little brother.

"Yeah, but she's from Metropolis, and she doesn't have a mom or any brothers or sisters or anything, just a dad. Maybe she doesn't know the Other Thing?"

...Hm. Clark might actually have a really good point. It was true that the Other Thing tended to work better on women than men, and on mom way more than dad. With only a dad and no siblings, it would have been hard for her to figure that one out on her own.

"Fine," Lex said. "The next time we see her, I'll ask her, and if she explains then there won't be yelling."

Most people Lex had met were reasonable, after all, and if she'd really been trying to help them somehow, at the very least that ought to be a mitigating factor to any anger he might be feeling at her dire insult to his person (me a Luthor? really?), and his frustration at her having acted like an idiot (who runs off like that, giggling like a loon?).

"Yay!" Clark enthused, punching his fists into the air.

"Don't 'yay' just yet," Lex warned him, with another tussle of hair. "We don't even know if she's got an explanation at all. If she doesn't, then there may be yelling." Not that he wanted to yell at her -- or anybody at all, per se -- but it was the principle of the thing, as he was nearly a 21-year-old responsible adult and all, and adult-yelling at kid-foolishness was sort of a required thing, maybe-possibly, even if he wasn't looking forward to maybe having to do it.

"'kay," said Clark, completely unconcerned at this possibility, and Lex found himself frowning a little as Clark squirmed until he'd turned around in place and edged in a little closer.

"...What?"

"Comic-bookery?" Clark asked hopefully.

Lex sighed and rolled his eyes, but he let Clark snuggle up against his side, and he put his arm around his little brother and opened his comic book back up to page one of the issue. (Whatever. It wasn't as though he minded rereading a few pages of Warrior Angel. It was Warrior Angel.)

Somehow, they both managed to make it through to the end before their father showed up, wanting to know if they were ready to start working on their chores for the day, and thoughts of Chloe were quickly wiped from Lex's mind for the rest of the night.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was wrong. The next time he saw Chloe, there was an explanation, and there was totally yelling.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex wasn't entirely sure what the deal was with the crazy-haired person who was violating the sanctity of his loft? But the guy was creeping him out. Super-long hobo-hair and a three-piece-suit just did not go well together. It also didn't help that the Chloe-girl was there ambushing him as well.

At the creepy-guy's first intrusion, however, Lex -- being one of the smarter Kents -- had immediately got up from the couch, walked over to the loft window, and yelled out it for--

"--Clark! Pretty sure I'm gonna start yelling soon!" Which oughta be more than enough of a really big clue for his little brother, given what they'd just been discussing the day-before-last.

Lex turned back to see the creepy guy staring at him. Chloe was glancing back and forth between them.

Lex stayed by the window, watching the creepy guy right back. "Look, uh, if you're looking for my parents?" he told the man, trying for the benefit of the doubt, just in case, "They're in the farmhouse. Just go down the stairs and--"

The creepy guy frowned, stopped just staring at him, and took a step forward.

"Yeah, okay," Lex muttered under his breath, "Right," and promptly reached to his left, grabbing up an old wooden baseball bat to hold it in a neutral position in front of him. He'd had enough issues with jocks in the past that he wasn't about to put up with any shit from anybody larger than him if he didn't have to, and in his experience the threat of impending violence usually tended to get people talking, or at least backing the hell off.

Duly armed, he announced, "Maybe you don't know this?" he informed the man, then ticked his chin at Chloe for a second. "But that girl doesn't live here; she can't exactly invite you in. So if you're not here for business with my folks, you're trespassing on private property." When the man stepped towards him, Lex took a step back. "Get out."

The man took another step forward, frowning almost in confusion. "...Lex?"

Oh great, he was looking for me. Where the hell did Chloe find this wild-haired, slit-eyed lunatic, anyway?

Lex lifted the bat and shifted his weight, ready to strike. "Back off. Now. I'm not asking again."

"Lex--" the man repeated, sounding annoyed. Lex gritted his teeth--

--and then he heard the door below them grate along its tracks. "Lex!"

And Clark was bounding up the stairs three at a time.

Lex held his stance, but circled away from the strange, creepy old man to his left, getting the couch in-between them.

Clark dodged around Chloe with barely an odd look tossed her way, and came to a halt at Lex's left. "What's wr--" Then Clark got a good look at the creepy guy and got a really strange expression on his face.

"...What?" Lex asked him, lowering his bat slightly. If Clark wasn't worried... was he worried?

"Chloe, what the heck?" Clark demanded angrily of her.

"What!" the girl said defensively. "I was right!"

"Clark--" Lex demanded.

Clark glanced at him sideways.

"That's Lionel Luthor," Clark told him under his breath.

Lex felt like he'd swallowed a bug.

"What," he croaked out, feeling sick because, seriously, what the hell...? Just... what the...?

"What, you don't recognize him?" Chloe said patronizingly, which for some reason had Clark wincing.

Lex couldn't see what was so wrong about him not knowing the guy on sight. "No," he informed her. "I don't watch a lot of TV. Or memorize newspapers," he added after a moment's thought. Clark was the one who was Metropolis-mad, not him.

And why should Lex know or care, anyway? So Luthor was a big deal in Metropolis and happened to own the factory in Smallville -- so what? Lex wasn't getting his degree in biochemistry to work on pesticides or fertilizer or anything like that. He was getting the degree because he wanted to be able to help out Clark, and it was the closest thing C.K.U. had to a biomedical degree program.

So yeah -- it wasn't like he was going to be looking for a job from the guy, so there was no reason to know him on that account, and Luthor being the town pariah didn't require that he learn and burn the guy's creepy face into his memory so he could revile him like the devil himself like everyone else in town did. ...Frankly, he'd never felt particularly inclined to waste his time on that particular sort of idiocy, on town rivals or team rivals or anything or anyone else; it was a waste of energy, and just made him feel nasty inside, anyway. He'd never really understood that sort of thing, really.

No, all Lex really wanted was for the creepy guy to get the hell out of his loft post-haste so he could finish his technical writing homework for class tomorrow. He still had half a paper due, and a bunch of reading left for his other, more-sciency courses before Monday lecture.

He heard his mom and dad calling him and his brother while making their way in and up the stairs, and he slowly began to relax.

He was glad when the first thing his dad did on seeing Luthor standing in the center of his loft was to bark out a sharp, angry "Luthor!!" full of unwelcome and censure.

He was really, really glad, and starting to sag in relief, right up until the point where Luthor barked right back, "What the hell did you do to my son!?!"

"He's not your son!" Jonathan shot back with all the acidity Lex had ever heard his dad muster, and then there was a dull thud.

Lex absently realized that that dull thud he'd just heard had been the bat he'd been holding hitting the floor of the loft, and when had he accidentally let go of it?

There was a lot more arguing and yelling going on between the two adults after that, which was mostly not registering at the moment, and Lex felt a little faint.

Then Lionel Luthor turned to him and said, with a tone of arrogant authority, as though expecting to be obeyed: "Lex, son--"

Lex saw red.

~*~*~*~*~*~

When Lex came out of it, swirls of red across his vision slowly losing their color, he was panting heavily, there was a pounding in his ears, and blood on his hands.

And he was pretty sure it was Clark who had his arms around him, half-dragging half-walking him down the staircase to the loft.

He wasn't sure of much else, though.

"What..." he croaked out through the mental noise buzzing in-between his ears. Everything was getting darker.

"Clark, get him inside," he heard someone say, he knew that voice, but just couldn't place it, his head hurt and...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex slowly drifted up out of the muted fog he was floating in, higher and higher. This was an in, and there was an out. He needed to get out. He knew it was important to -- he remembered that much. He concentrated and kept trying to get back, get back to...

He came to on the sofa listening to the sound of Clark's voice, which slowly resolved itself into a speech on how vanilla was so much better than chocolate.

"Your subconscious brainwashing has no effect on me, young padawan," Lex croaked out, as he blinked his eyes open, looking up into one of Clark's grins.

"Says you," said Clark. "I bet you'll come around."

"Hah. Hah." Lex let his eyes fall shut and he mentally started cleaning house. God, he hadn't had a grey-out fit in years. What the hell had--?

His eyes snapped open and he sat up abruptly, pulling his head up out of his younger brother's lap.

"Clark--"

"Hey, no, c'mon, just breathe, okay?" Clark told him, wrapping him up in one of what Lex termed his sticky-squid hugs -- arms everywhere, full wrap-around, no escape.

"I'm fine," Lex said with no small irritation. "I just--"

"He set you off," Clark told him, and Lex closed his eyes and grimaced again.

"I don't--" Lex swallowed. "That's not--"

He opened his eyes again and got a glimpse of his hands. They still had blood on them, mostly-dried now.

"How bad?" he asked.

"Broken nose, mostly," Clark told him, and Lex winced. "He deserved it anyway."

"Did I stop, or did you stop me?"

"You stopped on your own after he hit the floor. He was smart enough to stay down and stop talking when dad told him to. Once he broke eye contact..."

Lex let out a long, slow breath.

"It went red before the grey," Lex said slowly. "I think it was his voice. Something about the tone..." he shivered.

"That's consistent," Clark said quietly. Being his balance-check, like a good little brother.

Lex nodded curtly, once.

"I should wash my hands," Lex said quietly, and Clark slowly let him go.

"We should use the upstairs bathroom," Clark said, glancing over at the door. "I think they're coming inside."

They both went upstairs to the bathroom, getting the hell out of dodge.

Lex washed with care and precision, noting that it didn't look like he had nicked himself, so there had likely been no blood mixing between them, at least. Low risk of transmission of disease or infection.

Once Lex was settled in his bedroom, Clark snuggled right up to his side under his chin, and the door closed, locked, and barricaded with furniture, Lex finally asked, "What did I miss?"

"Luthor thinks he's your bio-dad, dad sounded like... maybe you might be adopted?"

Clark sounded about as happy as Lex felt. Lex hugged him tighter.

"I remember that part," Lex told him. "It sounded that way to me, too," Lex told him quietly. "What else?"

"Um..."

"Clark, I need to know." Brother code for this one is ours, not theirs.

Clark sighed, and squirmed a little.

"You vaulted the couch and punched Luthor in the face. He went down, I told you about that."

"And?"

"Lex..."

Lex waited.

Clark sighed again. "I heard them arguing about you not remembering while I was walking you across the lawn. Luthor wanted to know why you didn't remember him, and why dad didn't call him immediately when you stopped being nonresponsive."

"Stuporous," Lex absently corrected him. He'd read all his own medical files inside and out and understood them well. In the early days after the meteor shower, he'd reacted to light, heat, and pain, but had exhibited no higher levels of consciousness. His parents had been able to move him around and feed him, and he could sit up, sort of like a doll, but...

He was better now. His "grey-outs" weren't the same thing as his stupors had been -- they were more psychological than physiological, he was at least somewhat internally aware when he was having them, and he could usually come out of them all on his own, so long as he was left to his own devices for long enough. Too much external stimuli tended to drive him deeper, especially pain or violence upon his person. Clark's presence tended to speed up the process of his coming up out of the grey a lot, though.

That probably had something to do with the fact that he always felt safe around Clark. (That, and knowing full well what Clark would do to anybody who tried to mess with his big brother while he was stuck in a grey-out...)

Lex closed his eyes for a moment and let himself ratchet his mind up into overdrive. It was one of the few good things about his grey-outs -- he got that extra push of mental machinery right afterwards for a bit. Sometimes he did controlled drifts to a lesser effect when he got really stumped on something, but nowhere near as deep as any of his uncontrolled ones -- never to the extent that he consciously lost track of his body and surroundings -- and always with Clark around, just in case.

So he mentally stepped back and let things go, looked here, connected some things there, pulled some other things together elsewhere, and it all snapped together into a cohesive whole.

He opened his eyes again and shivered -- aftershocks -- then let his mental gears downshift, and downshift, and downshift again, until he was feeling like he was thinking a little more normally. For him.

He shifted a little in place, pulling away slightly, then tilted his chin towards his chest and looked down into Clark's eyes.

He said, "Dad adopted me, too. The meteor shower occurred. I was stuporous; Luthor... thought I was useless. He wanted to get rid of me until I wasn't useless anymore. I was adopted, the same time as you were." Lex frowned. "Hypothesis -- they wanted you, Luthor didn't want me. He would let them keep you if they paid his price. They had to take care of me, too, until I was... 'all better.' That was the deal." He paused.

"Exposure to you..." Lex stopped. They both knew that already -- Clark had a positive effect on Lex, always. Lex had responded to Clark from the very start, if only a little: fleeting response to gentle touches, occasional eye-tracking of his motion, recognition at close proximity. Their parents had noticed and then leveraged that, and Lex had slowly come back to interacting with the rest of the world. "I woke up, slowly; then I was back, but confused." He'd had retrograde amnesia. "Mom and dad didn't want to give me up, because I'm not a thing to be owned. My memory still hadn't come back." He had never remembered anything prior to being nine years old; it was all walled off by a blur of hot red fire and cold green rock that...

"Part of the deal?" Clark asked.

They'd never pushed him to remember, that wall that they'd said was never important to overcome. He was loved; that was all that mattered.

"Unclear. Doesn't matter; non-essential. I was treated like a thing," a broken thing. "I would have been treated like a thing again; they wouldn't hand me over." Not into that. He was loved. Lex took a shaky breath in and let it back out, done with his assessment.

He focused back on Clark.

Clark was smiling. That very particular sort of smile.

"I'd steal you again," Clark whispered to him.

...Lex didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

So he wrapped his arms around his little brother and quietly did both.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

When the yelling got loud enough that he could almost clearly hear the starts and stop-pauses of stacatto, rapid-fire and largely-angry words through the walls, Lex sighed, sat up in bed, and roused his brother.

"Do we have to?" complained Clark, and that almost had Lex stopping and changing his mind, because Clark had better hearing than he did, and had likely been following the content of the conversation.

"If mom gets involved..." and that was enough to resolve Clark's retiscence rather quickly. Nobody wanted mom involved. Shit got done when mom got involved. When she finally put her foot down, especially during a major argument, it was usually to the tune of everyone's general unhappiness. And since unhappiness in this case would likely involve Lex ending up back with Luthor...

They each took a side of the clothes dresser and lifted.

It was only another twenty seconds or so before the room was back in order, the bed was made, and the two of them were cautiously coming down the stairs back to the first floor and the living room.

...Uh oh. Mom had her arms crossed.

She turned her head and looked over to the stairwell, seeing them.

"Lex, honey," she said, "You don't have to come down. Everything's fine."

Oh, well, if that's the case, then-- Lex turned and made a beeline for back upstairs.

Clark grabbed him by the arm and force-marched him down the stairs, not about to let Lex get out of it when he hadn't gotten a reprieve. Drat.

So they both ended up standing behind the couches uncomfortably, as silence reigned for a short while as they made their reappearance in the living room. Luthor was standing in front of the fireplace, mom was by the front window to their left, dad was bracing his arms on the back of the kitchen-side recliner on the right (likely trying to strangle the back of the recliner instead of Luthor himself), and...

Lex glared downwards, then looked his mother in the eye. "Why, exactly, are we rewarding her for her bad behavior?" he asked acerbically. She set this in motion, and now you're letting her view the results!

"Lex, I'm sure she didn't mean for any of this to happen," his mother told him.

"One: yes, she did -- she went out of her way to bring Luthor here -- and two: yes, she did -- she's a teenager and she still stuck around after the yelling began," he pointed out, and why did no one else ever get in trouble when they ran Experiments, except for him? Unfair.

"I've called her father, he's on his way," mom informed him, giving him a look, and how was Lex supposed to be able stay righteously angry instead of start cringing when she did that? Was she trying to make him leave the room?

"Um," said Clark, "I could maybe take her and--"

"--Lock her in the storm cellar, good idea," Lex said promptly.

"NO," his parents shot down immediately, as Clark tried not to cough or look embarrassed. (He failed miserably at it.)

Lex just rolled his eyes at them all. "It's not like I didn't move all of the explosives out of there last week like you told me to; it's fine," he told them.

"Explosives?" Chloe perked up, and Lex glared down at her again.

Then he wondered if he really had been as thorough as he'd thought. And how much he wanted to risk it.

"Fine," Lex said. "Maybe the--"

"Lex--" Clark tugged at his sleeve and Lex turned to glance at him.

"...Oh, right," he realized at Clark's reminder. "--Okay, not there." He flipped through ideal locations in a rolodex in his mind and picked out the next-best place. "Well, maybe we could lock her in the--"

"I thought we put the--"

"No, no, that's bolted down, it should be fine," Lex told Clark, waving a hand.

"Except for the--"

"Oh, fine," Lex huffed. "Well, what about the metal cages in the--"

"--no-one is locking anyone up anywhere," his mother said authoritatively.

Lex and Clark both glanced up at her.

They glanced at each other.

They looked back over at her again.

"...Not even a little?" Lex asked.

Mom gave him the look again.

Clark winced, getting the by-blow.

His dad sighed.

"I'll take her down to the basement," he said. "For a time-out. She can wait down there."

...Yikes. Locking people up must be really bad if dad was the one coming up with the compromise.

Chloe pouted, but when dad gestured at her -- a firm 'follow me' -- she stood up.

Except-- "Wait, the heating system and the boiler machinery for the house are all down there!" Lex reminded him.

Chloe turned back to give him an odd look. "So?"

Lex spluttered, then opened his mouth to set her straight.

Clark elbowed him.

Lex turned to frown down at his little brother.

"Do you really want to explain and get her interested?" Clark muttered at him.

Lex's first impulse was to say 'yes, of course!' because educating the ignorant masses was important, but then he remembered the 'troublesome girl' angle.

"Point," he said to Clark. If he explained why HVAC systems were so awesome and how important they had been to modern settlements and human survival and such, she'd get interested and want to tinker with them. Which neither of them wanted her to do.

So Lex settled for turning back to Chloe, looking down his nose at her, and merely ticking his chin in the direction of the basement door.

The girl actually had the audacity to stick her tongue out at him before stomping off after his father. --The nerve!

"I wonder what you've been teaching... Lex if he's been playing with explosives and locking people up," Luthor said smoothly, which had mom giving him the look again. The bastard.

"They haven't been--" she paused, then straightened. "LEX!!"

Oh god, he really needed to work on his reactions. "--I didn't Experiment on Clark!" he rattled out defensively.

Clark nodded an affirmative quickly.

Mom was frowning furiously at him. "Then who did you--"

"Kathy."

"Pete's sister?!" Mom sounded scandalized.

"What's going on?" their dad asked as he walked back into the room.

"Lex has been putting Pete's little sister in a cage," mom said, sounding both angry and aggrieved.

"I helped! --by watching," Clark hunched his shoulders under his mom's glare.

"It's fine," Lex insisted. "I taught her how to write her name, then had her sign a consent form and a NDA."

"She's only ten years old!"

"Actually, she was five at the time."

"She was five at the time!?"

"Yes."

His mom seemed to need a moment to struggle with her thoughts.

Finally, she said tersely, "Lex, she's too young to give consent, even now, and--"

"I had her parents give consent, too, it's right there on the babysitting form," Lex told her adamantly, because if it really was a Bad Thing to lock anybody in a cage, then her parents would've said no. (Also, there would be no jails, and probably a lot more death penalty offenses in their society, but details.)

"That wasn't on the form I looked over," his mother said in dangerous tones.

"I wrote up a new one just for her folks," after he'd had to patiently explain a few things to Kathy and she'd gotten so excited that she'd insisted on being let in on it, "and I explictly pointed out the new line items to the Rosses," Lex told her, not giving an inch. They'd chuckled and said it was fine.

"Items??" Mom's voice went up the register. "--We are looking over that new form, young man!"

"Okay," Lex said, a little nonplussed, even though he knew he'd done everything right.

"And no more locking Kathy up in a cage."

"But she's been very helpful!" Lex protested. Enough so that for her help and silence, he'd promised to let her see the first major test runs of a few of his in-progress projects over the years, once he'd gotten them working. He still sometimes gave her rides on his electric bike, much to Clark's jealousy.

"Yeah, mom!" Clark piped in. "Lex has already fixed three big things--!"

"--and I've been keeping her well away from the labcoats," Lex interjected quickly.

"--just from the cage stuff alone!" Clark continued. "He--"

"Boys." Mom had her hands on her hips.

They both shut up.

And looked over to their dad.

Dad rubbed the back of his neck, then looked up at his wife and shrugged. "Could be worse."

"Jonathan!!!"

"Well, I know that when I had neighborhood babysitting duty way back when, there were a few kids that I would've liked to--"

Mom glared at dad, who was trying not to grin. His eyes were giving it away, though.

"How's Kathy feel about it?" their dad asked them.

"Oh, she loves it. All her friends are jealous," Clark reported.

"Wait, she's been talking to other people about it?" Lex said with no small concern. He'd had her sign a NDA for a reason, and she'd promised to keep quiet about stuff.

"Not about that stuff, just the other stuff," Clark said, and Lex relaxed, because that was fine.

"And how do you know that she 'loves it'?" his mom demanded of Clark.

Clark gamely replied, "Pete's been complaining to me about it; it's been weirding him out."

"Oh, good," Lex said quietly with a grin -- he was always for things that weirded out Pete -- and got elbowed by Clark again.

Their mother raised a hand to her brow and shaded her eyes, rubbing a finger against her forehead like she was getting a headache.

Lex and Clark both winced.

"...Are we grounded?" Clark asked, and this time Lex elbowed him for being stupid. (Historically, asking directly was asking for it, and Lex was not feeling that guilty!)

"We'll see," his mother said ominously. "I'll need to have a talk with the Rosses first."

...Well, that was better than nothing, Lex figured. The Rosses liked them; they'd probably put in a good word for them.

He glanced over at Luthor and realized that the hobo-haired old businessman was staring at him like he'd never seen him before.

It was a little gratifying, given that Lex couldn't remember having ever seen him before, either. It leveled the playing field a bit, in his mind.

Luthor cleared his throat lightly. "Perhaps we could get back to the matter at hand...?" he asked. His voice was already a great deal less nasal, and he hadn't used the tissue he was holding since Lex had reentered the living room. Given that it was barely spotted with blood, his nose had been restraightened, and he didn't look to be developing two black eyes, Lex probably hadn't done all that much lasting damage to the man.

It was a little scary how both mom and dad immediatedly refocused on Luthor almost instantly, almost as if they were obeying a command.

But before they got to the matter at hand, there was a knock on the door, and another interruption to take care of.

"--So where were the cages?" Chloe asked them as her father expressed apologies, hands on both her shoulders as he steered her along towards the entrance in front of them. "I didn't see any in the barn, and they can't have been in the storm cellar."

Oh for... Lex narrowed his eyes at her and added a new work entry to his mental tally: soundproof the basement.

Finally, the interlopers were gone and they could get down to brass tacks.

...Well, all interlopers except for Luthor. Rgh.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex disliked this seating arrangement more than the first. He and Clark were sitting up on the couch, while Luthor loomed over them from the fireplace and mom sat on the arm of the armchair to their left.

Dad was sitting on Lex's right on the couch with him, though, and Clark was squashed up against his left, which was the only good thing about this.

Luthor drew in a breath, almost puffing himself up in doing so, but before he could speak, Lex cut in smoothly, to forestall any tomfoolery or chicanery along with any sort of bluster on the man's part.

"I'm twenty years of age," Lex glared up at him. "I'm an adult in the eyes of a law. I'm not a child. You can't make me do anything, and if you try I'll make sure you regret it."

"Lex!" his mother scolded angrily, but Luthor just glanced at her and shook his head once.

"No, let him speak," said Luthor, overriding his mother, and that just made Lex even angrier.

He felt Clark's hand on his wrist and dropped his gaze down and to the left and kept it there. No direct gaze. Clark was right; he shouldn't risk another red-out attack again, especially not so soon again after the first.

Lex took a deep breath. "I don't--"

"You can't even look me in the eye?" Luthor said, in that sort of tone, and Lex gave a full-body twitch. He tensed all over -- prompting him to immediately close his eyes as he fisted his hands, trying not to shake.

He unclenched his jaw, worked on muscle relaxation techniques and said, with great care, "I could. But this time you'd likely end up with with more than a few bruises. Given the way you keep speaking to me, I can at least rationally extrapolate that much."

There was a long silence.

"You can't control yourself?" Luthor said mildly, and the tone, at least, was a great improvement. Now it was almost, but not quite, enough to set him off.

And Lex could deal with that. Even if he'd much rather just get up, punch him on purpose, and then walk out and leave.

Lex flexed his shoulders then forced himself to relax into the couch. Clark was here. Knowing that helped.

He managed to open his eyes again, opting to stare down at his hands instead. Still held in white-knuckled fists, he loosened them.

"This is me controlling myself. I can't always. I usually can. But I also usually don't have to." He took a breath in and let it out. No more blood on my hands today, please. "I don't have problems with most people. I haven't had a fit in years." Breathe in, out. "If someone had asked me a few hours ago, I would have said that it wasn't a problem anymore. I'd thought I was over and past this sort of thing," he said with painful honesty. "Or at least being unable to stop myself, forestall it, and exit the situation before it got any worse."

"We know what sets him off," Clark said quietly. He left it unsaid that the man had just hit nearly every hot button Lex had ever had. Hell, he was probably the original cause.

Lex snorted softly to himself at the thought. ...'Probably'?

"Do you have any questions for me?" Luthor asked. Lex saw him recenter himself in front of the fireplace.

"No, not really," Lex said, not nearly so mildly.

"Well, Lex. Be that as it may, I have some questions for you," he replied. "Both you and the Kents, who I had thought were an... honest sort."

"My parents," he corrected.

"They are not--"

Yes, they are. "--They adopted me," Lex cut in, tossing the easier argument out at the man who, by all accounts, only followed the letter of the law, never the spirit, and only so long as it suited him.

There was a slight pause. "I was under the impression that they had never broached the topic with you."

Chloe. He gritted his teeth. Not to mention his own responses. But the way that Luthor had phrased it...

It was harder than it should have been to keep his gaze down and centered on his hands. Did the man think him stupid? Easily manipulatable? --He was perfectly able to extrapolate, leveraging what he already knew, thank you! "They would never have agreed to merely foster me, I know that much. They're a very all-or-nothing sort, as well," he remarked, unable to keep a bit of mockery out of his tone.

Because, yes, his parents were, by-and-large, honest. They were also a lot of other things that Luthor likely had only the barest passing acquaintance with, if that. Secretive. Loving. Loyal. Trustworthy. Strict. Perceptive. Caring. To name just a few among a laundry list of other very important traits and qualities that Lex generally tried not to take too much for granted.

"And you aren't?" Luthor said mildly.

"I take after my folks," Lex said caustically.

"One can only hope," Luthor said in a neutral sort of tone that Lex didn't quite get, but that had his dad stiffening beside him.

"Why are you even here?" Lex asked rhetorically. "You clearly haven't been checking up on me, or keeping up with anything having to do with me. You dumped me when I was stuporous and left; I'd obviously been forgotten." His reaction in the barn would have been very different, otherwise.

"I hardly 'dumped' you," Luthor snorted. "Unless you think I could have chosen worse people to dump you with."

He bit down on a noise of protest. The man was baiting him outright on purpose. And why weren't his parents saying anything? That comment alone should have had his dad up in arms and shouting!

He glanced to his right and got a good look at his dad's face. He seemed torn somehow.

"Lex..." dad said, looking pained.

And then the lightbulb went on. Oh.

"Dad, I'm not angry that you never said anything," he told his father, reaching a hand out towards him to gently touch his arm. "I of all people should know..." He shook his head, because that wasn't something they discussed. "God, can you imagine what it would've been like if I'd grown up here knowing that?!" Because if he'd known he was adopted, he wouldn't have stopped until he'd figured out who his bio-parents were. And he would have figured it out, sooner or later. The only reason he'd stopped with Clark had been because...

But knowing his biological father was the town pariah? He'd have been patently unable to socialize with anyone at all, frozen with fear.

He of all people would and did know, because he'd had to worry about all of that when it came to his younger brother. He'd spent a lot of time over the years coaxing Clark to interact with others in town of any age, and coaching him in ways he might be able to do so. He'd tried to help him to make friends, despite the fact that a lot of the time the Clark Things threatened to get in the way. And when they did get in the way, he also shouldered most of the fallout.

But he wouldn't have been able to do any of that if he'd been such a mess himself.

"I could understand concerns to that effect, if the town was not already aware," Luthor said dryly, and Lex had to catch himself from looking up and giving the man a skeptical glare. "But your mother..." he seemed to shake himself, then said, "The Kents did adopt you, yes. Martha was rather persuasive on that front, actually," Luthor added. "Jonathan had reservations, but Martha was rather insistent." Lex saw the man turn to looked at mom, sounding amused. "And I certainly wouldn't get between the love of a mother for her son," he said, with no small bitterness.

Clark made a pained, almost-frantic sound, and Lex immediately slapped a hand over his little brother's shoulder and tugged. Clark turned to look at him, wide-eyed, and after Lex quickly shook his head once, he nearly collapsed in relief.

Whatever that was, it wasn't that. Lex had gone through that possibility as one of the permutations earlier upstairs. It had been near-impossible. They might both have had red hair at one point, but Lex wasn't Martha's biological son. The genetics didn't quite match up for a few of the recessive alleles -- not when compared to Luthor... or to dad, either.

Lex had had to mentally kick himself afterwards. He'd done quasi-comparisons on visual genetic comparisons between Clark and their parents, and pretty much anyone else they'd ever met, at one point or another, but he'd never thought to do it for himself. It had been a singular blindspot. ...Were there more?

He'd been trying to question everything since the White Lab Coats incident. It hadn't occurred to him until today just what 'questioning everything' might actually mean.

Oddly, Luthor seemed to pick up on the reaction. --And understand it, which was creepy. "The woman who gave birth to you was Lillian Luthor, my wife," Luthor offered up. "She died a few years ago."

Lex couldn't help but frown at the word choice again. "My biological mother."

"...Yes," Luthor said, with some recalcitrance.

God, he was being led, wasn't he? He'd started by saying he didn't have any questions, heavily implied he didn't care about any answers he might be able to give (because he hadn't, really), and now...

The manipulativeness of it all dearly made him not want to ask, but he still looked sideways, past Clark, and said it anyway. "What are you leaving out?"

"You were safer here, than with me."

Startled, Lex looked up and--

--dropped his gaze again before it went higher than Luthor's neck. Jesus God. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I took you home from the hospital," Luthor said ponderously, with an air of a man choosing his words carefully. "And Lillian... did not take your stuporous state well." He sounded grim. "I had to take you back." He sighed. "And then the Kents made of themselves an opportunity that I thought would most benefit you at the time."

Lillian is dead; I doubt I could ever get confirmation one way or the other on why he might have brought me back to that hospital. He could check the admittance records, but might Luthor have found a way to have them... edited? Assuming that there even still were records around anymore, with the events in question having happened more than a decade ago. Most hospitals only kept records going back seven years at most, and he didn't even know which hospital he had supposedly been in each time!

"What. Happened." Lex said. If Lionel was going to imply outrageous events and make baseless claims, Lex wanted them in a clear form. The better to hang the man with later.

"Lex..."

"Explain. Or leave," and don't come back. "Those are your two choices." Because you just had to push. Well, I can push back.

"It's a complex--"

"Uncomplicate it."

There was a long pause.

"I can't have this repeated outside of this house."

He glanced at his mom, then dad. Then Clark. None of them liked this any better than he did.

Lex's lips thinned, but he nodded once.

"Lillian did not take your situation well. I tried to force her to spend time with you. I left her alone with you, and... she attempted to smother you with a pillow."

Lex swallowed.

"One of the staff found you, we don't know how long later. You weren't breathing, and were completely nonresponsive after resuscitation. The doctors were worried that you might have brain damage, and none had any idea how to improve your condition; nothing they did had any effect."

Lex shut his eyes.

"Lex, please try to see this from my perspective. Even if your condition had improved immediately, even to what the doctors told me was the best outcome, it was clear that you likely would never have been able to stand up to the rigors and stress that exists between those at the upper levels of society."

"You couldn't have a mentally-decrepit idiot for a son."

"No, I couldn't," he admitted coldly. "You were meant to be my heir. If I had known that there had been even a chance that you would have become well again, capable of running LuthorCorp..."

Past tense. Past tense was good.

"I don't know how or why your condition improved so greatly; quite frankly, I don't care. It's a miracle."

Clark.

"And if I'd known--"

"You would have tossed me aside again if I didn't measure up," Lex finished. He'd been right -- it really hadn't mattered.

"No, I'd have found some other use for you," Luthor told him outright. "And now..."

Lex tensed, bracing himself.

"...I still don't think that you'd be able to handle the stress, or the everyday interactions necessary to run the business. Your behavior and reactions today has made that very clear."

...Why did he not feel more relieved?

Clark made a noise of protest, and Lex shushed him. Dad just snorted, because any involvement in the farm life and the side businesses could be stressful enough. Dad also knew what all kinds of trouble he and Clark usually ended up in in town. Some things... well, there were some that even his mom didn't know about, because it had just been a good idea to keep them between themselves -- and it wasn't because a lot of them were 'guy things.'

"No, that's just not fair!" Clark said anyway. "You just showed up and... you've been pushing him on purpose, and--"

"Clark, I wouldn't even want it anyway," Lex soothed him, placing a restraining hand on his arm.

In his peripherial vision, he saw Luthor stare down his nose at his little brother. "He can't even meet my gaze. He's actively avoiding doing so."

"He's not pushing it because he doesn't like hitting people," Clark told Lionel, in a very bloody tone of voice that suggested that maybe the opposite was true of him just then. "There were forty things that used to make him go red without him being able to help it. He's gotten rid of twenty-seven of those triggers completely, and the others he can mostly either recognize quickly enough to walk away or defuse the situation before somebody gets hurt, or notice-then-ignore," Clark said hotly. "He's gotten it down to three that almost never happen. And you hit all three a lot," Clark informed him angrily. "You've been doing it--"

"Clark."

"--and you keep doing it--"

"Clark."

"--even though dad already told you--"

"--Clark!"

Clark finally quieted, but he was huffy as all get out about it.

Lex let a deep breath in and out again.

"He... you usually avoid exposure to those three?"

Clark nodded at Luthor, answering for him.

"And these... 'grey-outs'?" Luthor asked mildly.

Lex shrugged. He didn't like talking about them with outsiders.

"Do you remember anything before coming to live with the Kents at all?"

I guess he's down to finally asking whatever he came here to find out, now that the circus was over. "No," Lex replied succinctly.

And when it became evident that Luthor wouldn't just let it lie, was willing to wait him out... "There's something... I call it the wall," he grimaced and ran a hand over his head, then looked down at his lap again. "I can't remember anything at all before it. I think the wall might be... short flashes of what happened right as the meteor came down." He took in a breath. "There are a lot of blank spaces in-between. And then there was the slow climb out of it."

All of that was something Luthor could have gotten from his medical records with his family doctor-slash-shrink. Or the right people in town, if he knew who to threaten. Nothing new.

"Lex's brainwaves are different during his grey-outs than his earlier stupor," mom added, finally joining in on the conversation. "Very different. We checked."

Lex paid attention to Luthor in his peripherial vision. The man seemed to be considering something, with the way he was running a hand through his beard, over and over again.

"Is he considered of sound mind and body?"

Well, that hadn't been what he'd expeted Luthor to ask. Why...?

"Yes," Jonathan answered tersely.

"Has he been for the last two years?"

What?

"Yes," answered his father, more warily. "Why?"

Luthor sighed. "Because he has an inheritance coming to him that I failed to transfer to him, if that is true."

"What?" Clark said, rising to the bait. Lex felt his skin tighten in goosebumps. No, no, wait--

"I'm not a Luthor," Lex said. "I was adopted; I'm a Kent." ...now, and would there ever be a point at which he would ever stop ending his thoughts with that, now that he knew his true biological parentage?

"That hardly has any bearing on the situation," he was told. "I've set up my affairs such that any biological heir of mine, of sound mind and body, would receive a portion of LuthorCorp voting stock once they turn eighteen years of age." He snorted. "It wouldn't even matter if you had been born out of wedlock; it's yours."

Lex broke out into a cold sweat. Oh god. He didn't want this. He didn't want any of this at all. He didn't want any ties to this man. No.

"I don't know anything about running or managing a company," Lex said, staring straight down at his lap. "And I don't want to."

Luthor sighed. Loudly. "Son--"

"Not your son," Lex answered coldly.

There was a pause.

"If you think you'll mismanage it, or don't want it, I'm more than willing to buy it back from you," he was told. "At a generous price. You can ask your parents to help you determine--"

"I don't want anything from you," Lex ground out, clenching his jeans in his fists at the knees.

Luthor barked out a laugh. "Well, you'll be getting something anyway," he was informed. "Hell, boy, spend it on charity if you want," he rolled across his tongue as though the very taste of the thought sickened him. "But it's yours, and you're getting it."

And on that note, Luthor strolled out.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was trying to remain calm and not freak out.

Clark wasn't exactly helping matters.

"Why shouldn't he keep it, dad? He could use it for more college right away! And secret-lab stuff!" Clark protested, looking about ready to bounce off the couch from frustrated nerves.

And, granted, while Lex knew it would be nice to not have to stop and try to build up enough cash in the meantime to both help fund Clark when he needed to go to college, and to jump-start a grad school career right away after graduating...

"Do you boys have any idea how Lionel Luthor got that money?" their dad demanded.

...Well, that hadn't been where Lex's mind had gone at all.

Clark and Lex exchanges glances.

"...By building up his company so the stock shares would be worth something?" Lex put out there, given Clark's confusion on the matter. He didn't know much about running a business, but he at least knew that much.

"He built that company on the backs of the people of this town!" their dad thundered down at them both from where he was standing. "He screwed over half the town once, and most of them paid him for the privilege of having it done to them!"

"Why?" Lex asked, baffled.

"--What?" his father said, brought up short.

"Why would people let him do... what he did... if they didn't like it?" Lex asked, frowning. This was really the first time he'd heard anybody say anything almost concrete about whatever had happened with Lionel and other people in town, the last time he'd been in town so many years ago. "I mean, if it was something that people wanted him to do..." What made it wrong to throw in with Luthor? And why would anyone go along with 'it' if it wasn't?

Jonathan drew himself up in what Lex generally termed 'lecture mode' and Lex had to stifle a wince.

"Nobody wanted to lose their jobs at the factory," his dad told him.

Lex stared at his father, then exchanged sideways glances with Clark.

"Dad -- what are you talking about?" Lex asked. "The factory's doing just fine, isn't it?"

"Now, yes ...mostly," dad said. "But when Luthor first bought the creamed corn factory, he made a promise to the Ross brothers he wouldn't be making any big changes, that he wouldn't fire anyone; he'd keep 'em on. Instead, he shut the plant down and laid off every last worker; put everyone out of work. Then he bought out their houses and their land at rock-bottom prices, and bought up more and more land in town, then tore down a bunch of property and built up those cheap townhouses on the far side of town. He filled them with his own people, who he brought in to run the factory when it reopened as a chemical fertilizer plant."

Clark and Lex exchanged another glance.

"...I thought the Rosses sold it because the plant was going under?" Clark asked.

Dad huffed out a sigh. "Well, yes, they were looking for a buyer to help turn things around, but--"

"A buyer's different than an investor, though, isn't it?" Lex said, puzzling his way through things. "Did the Rosses want to fix things themselves, or just sell it and make it someone else's problem?"

Dad opened his mouth, then shut it again.

"If he wasn't going to make big changes, wouldn't it have still gone out of business?" asked Clark.

"And doesn't retooling take time?" Lex asked. "All the machinery and processing tanks and everything would need to be a lot different for making fertilizer, instead of a natural food product." Lex might not know a huge amount about running a factory or business, but he knew some things from his biochem schoolwork, and from tangential discussions with some of his classmates.

Not to mention his own experience in needing to manufacture components for parts himself, or to make the materials he needed, ones that would be within the stress tolerances for his designs, instead of trying to scrounge up the money purchase them with what limited funds he had available to him.

"He laid everyone off and didn't open the factory for two years, on purpose!" their dad told them.

Lex exchanged another look with his brother, who had helped him get price quotes on things at times -- and delivery dates. "Are you sure it was on purpose, and not an issue with backorders for the specialty parts?" Lex asked. A lot of the stateside manufacture had moved overseas in the last few decades -- sometimes you just couldn't get things sooner than the several months of sea freighter and cargo-truck transport time, and that was if they could ship whatever it was immediately. If it needed to be made first... and then there was putting it all together properly once it arrived, and testing, and inspections...

"...You think he should have paid people for two years for doing nothing?" Clark asked slowly, and very tentatively.

Their dad stared down at the two of them.

"The plant only employs a thousand people, right?" Lex told their dad. "The town's got something like 45,000 people in it, and Metropolis is only an hour and a half away by car."

"Two hours," Clark needled him, because Lex almost never went just the speed limit.

Lex shrugged Clark's contribution off. "Whatever. Still. --Smallville wasn't that much smaller back then, was it?" Lex asked.

"Actually, it employs closer to 2,500 people today, but it was around a thousand when the Rosses owned it," their mother told them. "The town was only about 25,000-strong back then."

"Okay," said Lex. That was 1 in 25 people suddenly out of work -- 4% of the town population no longer gainfully employed. But as far as Lex understood it, almost every adult in town was employed at least part-time, and there was no reason to think that things might have been that different a decade ago. Laying off the factory workers would have just brought the unemployment rate up to the normal national average, and other places must have had ways of handling that.

So none of that answered the question of... "But why couldn't they get other jobs in the meantime?" Lex asked. "Or start their own businesses? ...Or help out on the farms in the area, or something? Or find a job in Metropolis and commute, if they really wanted to keep living here?"

"Most of the workers at the plant were unskilled laborers," their mom told them. "They couldn't just go out and get new jobs easily, and most of them didn't have a lot of money saved away to do something like starting their own business." And from mom's tone of voice... It was clear that she thought that someone with next to no marketable job skills would likely have a difficult time starting their own business, if they had even had an idea of what type of business they might want to do for that, or how.

"There weren't that many decently-paying jobs with unfilled positions just waiting around for people to take them," their dad told them. "You two will have more options open to you, getting a degree. But most of those plant workers barely got their high-school diplomas. --They were good folk, but they didn't have the advantages you kids do."

"But the jobs wouldn't need to be 'decently paying'," Lex pointed out. "They'd only need to be interim work, to pay enough to tide people over until the factory reopened."

"Luthor brought his own people in, son," dad said, as if he needed reminding.

"But that was after all those other people had already sold their property and left, right?" Lex said. It seemed kind of unbelievable that Luthor hadn't rehired anybody who'd worked for the plant previously. "And it's not like he refused to hire anybody from town. Mr. Jenkins is working for him right now, isn't he?" And had been for years. "He's been living in town a long time, and helped us work the farm just fine for awhile, before he started working for LuthorCorp," Lex pointed out.

"He wasn't working for the factory before," dad told them.

"No, but you could've hired people from the factory on as 'hands just as easily, instead. Did anybody approach you?" Lex asked.

But dad was just shaking his head.

"Son, Luthor owns half the town, now. He lied and took advantage of people."

"But, people didn't help out?" Clark asked, confused. So was Lex, because that was a good point.

"If Lionel buying up land in town was so bad, then why didn't they hold a town meeting and come up with some alternatives over the displaced factory workers selling their homes and moving?" Lex asked, picking up Clark's train of thought.

"The bank could have decided not to call in anybody's mortgages for awhile, like they do with the farm," Clark said. They both knew that half the reason the farm hadn't been sold yet was because their dad was friends with the bank manager and they always paid off their installments... just not always immediately on time, especially when the weather wasn't cooperating and the crops came in late.

"And he didn't lie," Lex said. "He made sure the plant wouldn't go under."

"He didn't keep his promise not to change anything!"

"If he hadn't changed anything, it would have gone under, and everybody still would have lost their jobs!" Lex told him. "The factory would still have closed, only it would've stayed that way! Would that have been any better, or would you have been angry with him for that instead?!"

"Son--"

Lex got up and started pacing in front of the fireplace, agitated almost beyond reason. "Is this why everybody hates him so much?" he asked. "Because he actually found a way to keep the factory from going under?"

"That's not all he did, Lex," his dad told him, in descending tones.

"No, he apparently got me away from my homicidal bio-mom and gave me to you," Lex said. "Am I supposed to be angry about that?!?" he demanded.

His father flinched and sucked in a breath.

"The only substantial thing anybody in town has ever said within Clark's or my hearing as a specific complaint about the plant is that it's polluting the town," Lex said. "And my fifth grade science fair project pretty much debunked that one straight-up, and you know it," he told his parents. It had been a point of contention with the town judges, and most of the adults, but he'd known his methodology had been sound. Yes, the factory only barely passed the EPA requirements, but the runoff was within those limits -- and still remained within them, Lex and Clark hadn't ever stopped gathering samples and testing them. Further, anything it did let out in the wastewater runoff went into the water table downstream of the town.

His more-controversial hypothesized cause for a possible source of 'ecological weirdness' had taken much longer to track down and caused a lot more contention in the town as a whole -- mainly, water table runoff from some of the more stagnant water ponds dotting the countryside. Like Crater Lake. It had taken years of consistent, steady work, and he'd presented his findings and initial warnings regarding the meteor rocks for his seventh-grade science fair project. That had gone over even less-well within the town community.

Even more frustratingly, to-date he still hadn't convinced the EPA that the meteor rocks were a problem. The agency kept insisting that the rocks were harmless. Lex didn't believe any such thing, but he didn't have the hard evidence he needed to back it up -- only correlation, not proof of causation.

Worse, Lex wasn't able to get them that hard proof with the current limited resources available to him. And Lex himself was more than a little wary about attempting to run tests on the material himself without proper protection, equipment, and scanning devices that he could not yet obtain himself or talk someone into being given access to. And that was sidestepping the whole issue of the blasted things making Clark sick by mere close-proximity.

He was fairly sure that the most harmful radiation they apparently gave off, with respect to Clark reactions to them, had to be in the alpha-particle range, because lead or other thick shielding either reduced the most obvious effects or stopped them completely. However, from what he'd read, beta and gamma radiation wouldn't be stopped by such thin shielding and could do much worse long-term damage to a biological organism's cells. Lex wasn't about to go around risking his little brother's health like that.

"Anything besides the 'polluting the town' nonsense that people have grumbled about has always been general nonspecific and unspecified hate," Lex continued. "If the real reason everyone in town hates Luthor is because he's an outsider that turned the factory around..." The thought made Lex almost ill, and was hurting his head a lot.

"Lex, how many times do I have to tell you?" his father told him with exasperation. "The ends don't justify the means!"

"What means were so wrong, then!?" Lex demanded, crossing his arms and feeling... well, he wasn't entirely sure how he felt at the moment.

"Lex, you don't understand," his mom said, and Lex couldn't help but make a noise of sheer frustration. --Of course I don't understand, you still aren't explaining it to me!!

"Son, he swindled people--"

"--When? How??"

"Lex..." Dad sighed. "Do you remember Mr. Bell, and how you and me and Clark used to go fishing on his property? How about Mr. Guy, who sent us pumpkins every Halloween? Well, Lionel Luthor promised to cut them in on a deal. He sent them flashy gifts to convince him they were friends, and once they'd sold him their property, he went back on his word. He had them evicted, son."

"What kind of deal would he cut that would have people turning over control of their property to him but not moving out?" Lex asked, frowning furiously. "Some kind of tax evasion? Paying lower rent than their current mortgages, or their property taxes?" That sounded both greedy on their neighbors' part and more than a little illegal.

"He lied to them."

"And they were being greedy and stupid," Lex muttered. "You and mom always tell us to read the fine print, get everything in writing, to understand what we're signing up for before we say yes..."

"And why do you think we taught you that?" their dad told him, and Lex got quiet.

Dad sighed. "Son," he said, reaching a hand out towards Lex, "I know that you don't want to think the worst of your biological father, but his actions aren't yours," dad told him. "You don't have to try and defend him."

"--What?" Lex breathed out in shock. "I'm not defending him!" he said, and then felt the real hit to his gut.

He hadn't understood it then, but one of the judges at the science fair, back in fifth grade... He'd talked down to him, had flippantly wrote off all of Lex's hard work, told the other judges that Lex was just defending Luthor.

It hadn't made sense at the time, because Lex hadn't been defending Luthor. He'd been defending his own scientific methodology and his hard work, and how careful he'd been in his sampling, measurement, and data analysis. That was what had been under attack, why they hadn't believed him, he'd thought.

But now...

Lex paled. "I-- I don't even like him," he stammered out, and Clark was hovering at his shoulder now, concerned. "I... I'm not--" And Clark had a right to be concerned -- he could hardly think through the sudden panic. He'd thought that Lionel had been lying, that no-one in town knew that Lex was his... had been his... son...

But people knew.

--Who else knew?!?

"Lex, just..." his dad stepped in closer, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Anyone I've seen who gets tied up with him always ends up somehow the worse for it. You don't know the man, and frankly I'd like to keep it that way. All right?"

Lex looked up into his dad's eyes and nodded, shakily.

His dad clapped his hand on Lex's shoulder, then shook it slightly.

Lex gave him a weak smile.

"Um," said Lex. "I think I need to sit down again."

Dad laughed a little, and so did mom. Clark just pulled him back over to the couch and plopped right down.

Lex sat back down again with marginally more aplomb than Clark. He didn't stop being the older brother just because he was having a bad day, even if he had lost his cool for awhile.

"Is there anything else you think I need to know?" Lex asked his parents.

"What do you mean, honey?" his mom asked.

"Lionel made that weird honesty dig." ...Wow, even Clark had picked up on it.

His parents exchanged a look. It was more confused than surreptitious, until the light seemed to go on for their dad.

"When we were all three together sitting around a table in one of the hospital conference rooms, putting your adoption through," dad said, "and just finishing signing the paperwork, Luthor said something about how we'd be wanting to give you back sometime soon."

"That we were 'in over our heads' and would 'come running back to him for help, soon enough'," mom clarified with a frown.

"Your mother told him off," dad said with a smile. "And then he--"

"Oh," their mom said quietly, blinking and turning to dad with a slight frown. "--But that wasn't what he meant, though."

Lex frowned, and he felt Clark shift uneasily next to him.

"No, it wasn't," dad said, "but he likes to mince words. --The next thing he said was that there wasn't any shame in giving up if we couldn't handle things one way or another, and that he wanted us to contact him if anything changed."

Lex winced, because dad echoed the tone of Luthor's words slightly, and it had sounded more than just vaguely mocking.

"He expected you to give me back," Lex said, starting to feel a slow burn.

Clark was frowning. "But what he said wasn't..."

Lex reached up and combed a hand through Clark's hair. "Tone, Clark," he said, comforting his confused little brother. "He was implying that mom and dad wouldn't be able to take care of me because he thought I'd remain stuporous. He was saying that he'd... maybe do them a favor and help them out a little, or take me back, when they couldn't handle it."

"Even though most people would mean that to be saying that they'd pitch in with financial or other support if things took a turn for the worse and Lex needed further hospitalization or similar ...which is likely what he's trying to imply now," their dad finished for them grimly.

"Maybe he means it?" Clark asked tentatively, which had Lex sighing and tussling his hair.

"You think too much of people, sometimes, Clark," Lex told him sadly, and leaned sideways a little to touch his forehead lightly against Clark's.

"I still think you should get to keep the money," Clark said quietly, but stubbornly.

"I really don't want any ties to him, Clark," Lex told him.

"And the strings that go with it. There's always a catch with him," dad warned them.

But Lex was straightening slowly.

"Maybe..." he tried to think it through. "Maybe the catch is that it's only money." Lex looked up at his parents. "Maybe he doesn't want me to have the stock."

Dad frowned. "He could just not give it to you..." but mom was shaking her head. "Martha?"

"If it's a living will, and Lex should have gotten it years go, he can't just go changing that around after the fact," their mom told them. "Lex is legally entitled to it. Lionel might actually be in a bit of trouble for not turning it over two years ago when he should have, depending on how the documents are worded."

"...So, maybe the catch is that he'll want me to sign something saying it's okay it's late?" Lex said with the first stirrings of hope. Money he could set aside for a rainy day and both worry and think about later.

"Lex..." his dad said with something approaching censure.

And Lex had a fairly good idea of what his dad was going to say. "Dad, I can't just give it back, it's an inheritance, not a gift. I don't think it works like that."

"And we'd still have to pay taxes on it," mom said slowly, leaving dad looking grim.

"I still don't like this," dad informed them all.

"Well, we don't have to resolve everything right this minute," mom told them. "Why don't we all sleep on it."

Lex wanted to sleep -- craved it even -- but... "I can't sleep yet, I still have homework to do," he complained quietly.

"I'll get your books from the loft," Clark said, shooting to his feet.

"Take your time," Lex said, both giving him tacit permission to enter his loft, and reminding him to stay 'slow' so that Clark wouldn't just speed out and back again faster-than-humanly-possible. Who knew if Lionel was still lurking around?

"'k!" he was told by his reenergized younger brother.

Clark made for the kitchen door and the barn loft. Lex got up and made for his bedroom upstairs.

He fell asleep at his desk, his technical writing essay half-complete, and his coursework reading left undone.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex wasn't sure if it was luck or the deepest of ill fortune that his technical writing class was his first class on Monday mornings, the first of three lectures. His professor for the course had called out and stopped him before he'd left the room, and had been even more dismayed with him at his somewhat meek query upon lack of assignment turn-in with the line of other students at the end of class: the grace period for late assignments was two days, and 10% off the total possible score per-day, wasn't it?

And then the professor had grilled him mercilessly in front of the entire (exiting) class until he'd finally had it dug it out of him that he hadn't done the assigned reading for that day, either -- hence his lack of usual participation in the class that morning -- because he'd accidentally fallen asleep early the night before. Why? More digging, until Lex had eventually, painfully admitted what was none of anyone else's business: that he'd just found out that he was adopted the night previous via an unexpected house call by his biological father. And then been completely horrified upon hearing it.

Lex had promptly been informed that family emergencies were a official, valid reason for excused absences and makeup work without the usual late penalties, and that what had happened to him counted as such.

Lex had dithered. It was his own fault; he shouldn't get special consideration; he was fine. The professor had then demanded to see his course notes for the day, if he was so fine. That had been even more embarrassing, because he'd hardly been able to concentrate in class and they were far worse than subpar.

Before he really knew quite what was happening, his professor had polled the rest of the class and given him a list of three people who would be giving him copies of their notes for the next five days, he'd been ordered to hand over his work for the rest of the day to one of the other biochem students who would turn it in for him and let his other professors know what was going on, and he'd been ushered into one of the faculty lounges and told to lie down and sleep before trying to drive back home.

Some days, Lex really wasn't all that happy that all his professors had been informed via medical excuse notes at the beginning of every semester about his 'concentration issues,' courtesy of his grey-outs. He could concentrate just fine, thank you. But his parents had pressed the point from the beginning for safety reasons, due to his chemistry labs -- because if he'd somehow had an unexpected grey-out during one of those...

It was the first time he'd ever had to, effectively, fall back on that excuse, and he hated it.

He hated that he'd needed it even more. And he had needed the increased attention and concern that the knowledge of his faults had engendered that had likely prompted the grilling he'd gotten -- the fact that his own thoughts had started to fall into stilted prose poetry was probably a really good indicator of that. He only did that when he was a little bit in shock, and trying to disconnect from the world around him. Like he did when he tried to lose himself in SF&F over his usually-preferred non-fictional reading material.

That he had been trying to disconnect from the world around him, even a little, was a really bad sign.

At least he'd had no lab courses that day.

He realized how badly he'd needed the extra sleep once he'd woken up later, with someone's ratty old (comfortable) blanket laid over him. Some kind soul had left him a sandwich, soda, and note declaring such on the table in front of him, too.

Lex ate it. He'd kind of needed the energy boost. He'd skipped dinner entirely, declaring that he wasn't hungry, and had refused to come down. He'd barred the door against Clark-entry, too. He was regretting that now, because he'd likely not been having such issues as he'd been having today if he'd just given in and not been so stubborn the night before, even if he'd thought he wanted to be alone. (He hadn't really. It had been faulty thinking, that it was more important to be alone just then than to rely on Clark and have him with him close-by.)

He folded the blanket and left it over the back of the couch in the faculty lounge before more-or-less sneaking out. He made a short stop at one of the computer rooms to check his email, and sent reply messages to his other teachers apologizing and thanking them for their patience with him. Whoever his technical writing teacher had tapped out to go around contacting all his professors had been thorough, unless the teachers themselves had talked. Regardless, he was going to have to figure out who it was and thank them; they weren't on the list of note-takers he currently had for his one writing course, and he hadn't been paying enough attention at the time they'd volunteered for the action to remember them now.

With his professors already informed -- and in a few cases, having threatened via email that they'd throw him out of the room if he tried to show up anyway -- Lex had no real choice but to walk to his electric bike, get on, and drive home.

-ish. He pulled into the parking lot for the Beanery and went inside to wait for Clark. He wanted to be with Clark, and middle school hadn't let out just yet, and Clark always dropped by the Beanery first before heading home, these days.

So he stole himself a corner booth, sat down, put his head down on the table, pillowed his head in his arms so it wasn't completely uncomfortable, and waited.

He wasn't sure if he'd dozed off of not -- he couldn't have greyed-out though, or he'd have gotten the mental boost, and he was just tired as hell still instead -- but it felt like he had blinked, and then Clark was there.

Chloe with him.

So was Pete.

It was Pete that set him off.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The first words out of Pete's mouth had been, "Hey, Lex, how's your dad doing?"

It was only after Lex was up on his feet, Clark at his side with his arms wrapped around him in restraint, and having spent the last ten minutes cursing Pete out in English, Spanish, Latin, and now Japanese (and severely regretting learning Japanese before German, because the Japanese had Warrior Angel manga, but German had better curses by far), when Pete finally moved from wide-eyed shock to red-faced anger, demanding "What the hell are you talking about?!" that Lex had finally realized his mistake.

Lex immediately went silent and still, his gut churning. It should have been nothing new -- Pete had asked him the same question for years now, whenever he'd first seen him. It had only meant something different for the first time today.

And now Lex was torn between shame -- because what if Pete really didn't know? (ludicrous though, given Chloe's presence beside him) -- and horror -- ...because what if Pete didn't just know? What if he had known all along?

And if Lex was a betting man...

--Lex didn't make bets.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Lex asked him, voice hoarse and raw with emotion.

"Tell you what?" Pete said, still angry. "About your dad? You've seen him more recently than I have!"

"Why didn't you tell me?!?" Lex shrieked. Because Pete had known all along -- and, god, of course he must have! Pete's father had been one of the factory owners, bitter about the deal and the Luthors in general, he'd have had no reason not to talk. And then--

Oh, god.

So when every time Pete had asked him about his father... every time he'd talked about his hatred of the Luthors... --it was like having been surreptitiously stabbed with a knife by someone he'd thought was his friend, over and over again, and not even having realized that he'd been bleeding.

Well, it was hurting to hell now. He was feeling it now.

"Tell you what, you idiot!?!" Pete snapped back.

Pete was more Clark's friend than Lex's, and he and Lex sniped at each other all the time, but that was just their thing. Kind of like how Pete and his brothers interacted, but verbal, not physical. He was supposed to be Lex's friend, too.

That was just supposed to be a thing between them.

A harmless thing.

"Lex?"

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no.

Somebody had called Pete's dad. Mr. Ross. Oh no.

Lex made a soft, pained noise that stuck in the back of his throat, and tried to back away, except Clark was still holding him fast, so he didn't get anywhere.

"Pete?" Mr. Ross said, then, "Clark, Lex, what's going on?"

Lex wanted to crawl under the nasty tile flooring and just die.

"I-- I--" he stammered, still straining to pull away, except Clark still wasn't letting him, but he needed to get out of there before--

Mr. Ross was looking at him in confusion. Until he wasn't.

Lex saw the spark of understanding go off.

Mr. Ross stepped forward.

Lex flinched.

"Lex," Mr. Ross sighed, and he very, very gently reached up and lay his hands on Lex's shoulders.

"It isn't your fault, Lex," he was told, with a very small shake. "You didn't do anything wrong."

For some reason that just made it hurt so much worse.

"I'm sorry," Lex gulped, trying desperately not to cry, he was an adult, dad would kill him if he found out, you didn't cry in front of other people. He clutched fists to the sides of his head, almost trying to physically press them back. If you were a man, you didn't cry, period. "I'm sorry!" he apologized shakily, around the hard lump in his throat.

"What the hell?" Pete said angrily. "You're sorry to my dad?! You just cussed me out, in front of like everybody and their dog, for no reason! And--"

"Pete, just..." Mr. Ross started to say, letting go of Lex and holding his hands out as he turned towards his youngest son.

"Lionel Luthor is my father," Lex said dully and swayed. It just slipped out.

Chloe looked startled. (Why?)

Pete threw back his head and laughed.

Once.

And then the smile of amusement (did he think it was a joke?) slowly fell off of his face as he looked between Clark, and Lex, and his dad.

"No, really," Pete said uncertainly.

"Pete--" his father began.

But Pete shook off his father's hand, just shoved it away, and stared at Lex for a moment.

"You--" he stopped, then started again. "You're Lionel Luthor's son."

And then Pete finally seemed to get it.

Lex just stood there.

He felt the connection between them snap, the force of the recoil like nothing he'd ever experienced before or since.

Lex had thought he'd seen anger before. Thought he'd seen hatred. They didn't hold a candle to what was on Pete's face now, shining out of his eyes, for all the world to see. Pete was made ugly by them.

It took Lex's breath away.

Clark made a pained sound.

Lex turned towards his little brother. He blinked slowly.

Oh.

"Clark," he said softly.

Clark was pale as a sheet, looked unbelievably scared.

...Small wonder. He'd just watched his own worst nightmare played out right in front of him, unable to do anything to stop it, and the person it had been happening to was his big brother.

What happens when somebody finds out your deepest, darkest secret, and hates you for it?

"Clark." Lex reached his hands up to cradle his little brother's face. "It's all right."

He was strangely in a pool of utter calm now. It was a weird sensation, almost like floating. Nothing else really matttered right now, anymore, except for Clark and making things better.

But Clark was beginning to sob. Great, heaving sobs, like he couldn't breath right, but he wasn't crying. There weren't any tears. But he was still sobbing, still sad and scared and feeling hurt and all alone.

Lex could do better. He had to.

"Clark." Lex tried to smile, but it felt wrong. He still kept on doing it. "Clark, let's just go home, okay?" It was vaguely weird, that his voice sounded so calm, and smooth, was no longer shaky like it had been before.

Lex stroked his hands down his brother's cheeks, along his jaw. "We'll go home, and be safe there, and everything will be all right, okay?" He repeated the motion, to soothe. "Let's go home. Okay?"

Lex wasn't really sure why his mouth tasted like salt, or why his face felt wet, just that they did.

Clark was still sobbing, but Lex slowly managed to get him turned around, take him by the hand, and they walked out.

Afterwards, Lex couldn't say what anybody else might've done or said as they left. But nobody had physically tried to stop them from going.

He couldn't remember anything of note occurring on the way home either. All he really remembered from the trip was Clark clinging to him as he rode behind Lex on his bike, his arms grasped around Lex's middle so tightly, as though he was afraid that Lex was going to suddenly disappear on him, never to be seen again.

It made Lex want to smile, because it was such a silly thought. Lex wasn't going anywhere.

Why would he? Clark was here.

~*~*~*~*~*~

It wasn't until they were safely esconced on the living room couch in the farmhouse proper, back at home, lying down and cuddled up together in blankets, that Clark started to finally calm down somewhat.

Lex rubbed at his face a bit with his sleeve cuff, still a little bit disturbed at all the moisture. It hadn't been raining on the way home, had it? ...No, it couldn't have been -- their clothes were still dry. And Clark's face wasn't wet.

The thought got away from him when Clark moaned, morosely, "Pete hates us now."

...There were so many things wrong with that statement. "Clark, Pete doesn't hate you now," Lex told him gently.

"B-but, he hates all Luthors," Clark sniffled, and it took Lex a moment.

Oh. Clark hadn't been upset, worrying about people finding about the alien-Clark Thing. It had been far more of an immediate concern than that.

"Clark, you're not a Luthor," Lex told him, but Clark just shook his head quickly and cuddled into Lex's chest a little closer.

Lex sighed and wrapped his arms around his little brother a little tighter. Well, it was worth a shot. He knew full well how Clark logicked his way through things. Lex was his brother. If Lex was a Luthor, then that would, by logical-Clark-extension, make Clark a Luthor, too.

The only conceivable way to try and break that chain of causal relationship would be trying to convince Clark that Lex was not his brother. Which Lex was not wont to do -- first and foremost because it would be a blatant, outright lie. And they didn't lie to each other. Ever.

So he settled for running his fingers through Clark's hair and murmuring snippets of chemical formulas to him, instead.

It worked like a charm: Clark promptly fell asleep shortly thereafter, just like he always did when Lex did that.

"Bad day?" their mom asked, and Lex wasn't entirely sure when she'd exchanged the quiet bustle of the kitchen for the living room. Was he blanking out? Micro-naps, maybe?

Should it be a cause for concern, if he didn't seem to be missing anything important in the interim? ...Maybe it was just that his time-sense was a little off at-present?

"I've been temporarily banned from campus," he quietly informed his mom over Clark's gentle, soft and even breathing, and his mother let out a small, quiet laugh.

"I know, I got a call from one of your teachers at school," she told him, and he grimaced. He got a smile and a quick peck to the side of his head for his trouble.

"Pete found out about me," Lex said quietly. "Mr. Ross already knew. I apologized to him; I think I need to apologize to Pete, too."

"Honey, Bill always knew. He didn't care. He knows you're not your father."

Lex was quiet. It was such a different thing, hearing his mom say it, and having heard Mr. Ross say it.

"And Pete's mother feels the same way."

"Well, she'd kind of have to," Lex said grumpily after a moment, "It's her job." She was a judge, after all, and supposed to be impartial in all things by extension.

His mom laughed lightly again. "Even some judges have certain cases that they can't judge, Lex," he was told. "But you're right; she's very good at her job."

...That was vaguely comforting.

"Pete hates me, though." And his older brothers might, too, which was a thought that nearly made Lex shudder. The family had a history of supplying male linebackers for the Crows.

"I'm sure he'll get over it," mom told him.

I'm not.

"...Do you think Mrs. Ross might be somebody to ask to help with the stock-money buyout deal?" Lex asked his mom.

"Lex, honey, she's pretty impartial, but that might be pushing it," his mom said with a rueful smile, lightly stroking her fingers over his head.

Lex sighed deeply, then settled into the couch around Clark just a little more comfortably.

"It's okay, Lex. Go to sleep. We'll still be here when you wake up."

Lex smiled as he let his eyes drift shut. His mom always told him that.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex hadn't planned on leaving the house the next day, but he was going a little stir-crazy, mainly because he couldn't go to campus and attend his college classes, either -- he'd just get noticed the first time he opened his mouth and kicked out of the room, as per the aforementioned warning in his professors' emails. Not that that would've worked out, because he still wasn't concentrating well. So he didn't have anything to do.

...mostly because his dad was too smart to let Lex mess around with anything on the farm while he was stuck in his current state of being. Whatever that was. Lex simultaneously felt like he could sleep for ten-thousand years, but also unbelievably jittery under the surface of his skin. It was annoying.

So despite his having decided the day before that never, under no circumstances would he ever enter town under any circumstances not requiring force under duress ever again, Lex still found himself at the Beanery again that afternoon, waiting for Clark.

He was very grumpy due to his recent spat of problems, however, so most everyone was giving him a wide berth as he hunched over in his small corner booth. His feet were brazenly planted on the vinyl cushion with his knees pulled up to his chest, his was head huddled in his arms on top of them, and he glared viciously over his forearms at anyone who looked like they might dare approach him.

It was completely his mood driving everyone away, of course, and had nothing to do with his ignominous Luthorian status at all.

He treated his waitress with respect, of course, but at soon as she went away he'd unstraighten back down into his hunched pose and go back to glowering at the world again.

Eventually, Clark showed, with Pete and two others in tow.

Pete stopped in front of the table, crossed his arms, and glowered down at Lex right back.

Lex decided that hunching in further was probably a bad idea, and Pete wasn't exactly giving him the new-hate-face -- more a scowly-irritated older one -- so he slowly straightened up, raising his head, and loosened his form to one where his knees weren't being squeezed tightly up against his chest.

Pete shifted slightly upon seeing this, then squared his shoulders.

"I didn't deserve to get yelled at," Pete informed him, as Clark anxiously glanced between them several times, shifting from foot to foot.

"I'm sorry; I shouldn't have done that," Lex muttered. He meant it too.

Pete held his gaze until Lex looked away and his shoulders slumped.

Clark heaved a huge sigh of relief and immediately slid into the side of the corner booth, right up next to Lex, as Pete took the opposite side. Lex slowly unwound, dropping his legs down and sliding his socked feet back into his shoes, under the table.

"Why's she here?' Lex asked Clark with a nudge, glancing over at Chloe, now that his confrontation with Pete had been resolved.

"She's here because I want her here and you should be thanking her," Pete told him before Clark could say a word. "Clark was avoiding me today, and she played telephone."

"She's an instigator, not a peacemaker -- you're the instigator," Lex repeated at her more loudly, in case she hadn't heard what he'd told Pete. "You should be apologizing to me, not the other way around -- it's your fault in the first place!"

"You would've found out eventually," Chloe said without remorse, sliding down into the seat to sit next to Pete.

"Maybe," he admitted, "but I wouldn't've had Lionel Luthor on my doorstep poking about, and that's on you."

Clark poked him slightly in the arm and Lex looked away towards the wall.

"...But apparently you helped make Clark feel better today after what happened with Pete, so I mostly forgive you for being an idiot, as long as you don't do it again," he added grudgingly, and he felt Clark relax a little next to him.

"Wow, I'm really feeling the love here," Chloe said sarcastically. "Is he always like this?"

"Only when he's in a bad mood, or doesn't like you and is being a jerk on purpose, so yes," said the third person who Lex had yet to acknowledge.

"Lana," he said neutrally.

"Alexander," she said in a similar fashion, before taking her end seat, next to Chloe.

They stared at each other flatly across the table.

"Okay, I'll bite," said Chloe after this had been going on for awhile. "Why do you two not like each other?"

"He's a necklace-stealing jerk!" Lana informed her hotly, pouncing on the chance to get to tell the one last person in town who hadn't heard the story before. "He tore my mother's necklace off me and threw it away into a river!"

"It wasn't your mother's necklace," Lex scoffed, "Nell had it made for you out of that rock that killed your mother. And if I'd known you were going to jump into the river after it, I'd've tied you to a tree first," he informed her pithily. "--Yes, she is that much of an idiot," Lex told Chloe as an aside.

"I was ten!" Lana protested.

"That was only three years ago!" Lex pointed out harshly. "You were in fifth grade; you should have known better."

"And I didn't jump in, I leaned on the railing too hard and fell in!" Lana continued hotly.

"Railing?" Chloe asked.

"They were on a bridge," Pete told her. "It was slippery."

"And Emily nearly drowned jumping in after you," Lex said. "And I nearly drowned grabbing your best friend before she went under again, after wearing herself out saving you."

"I helped!" Clark put out there. "--with the not-drowning part," he added quickly. "I got down to the riverbank really quickly to help pull everybody out of the water."

"Yes, you were very helpful," Lex murmured, stroking a hand through Clark's hair. Clark looked very pleased with himself.

"Emily-who?" Chloe asked. "And why haven't I met her yet?"

"Emily Dinsmore," Pete put out there. "She's the dark-haired girl in the back of our English class? She's got ballet lessons after school."

"You still stole my necklace!" Lana insisted at Lex.

"You're welcome," Lex told her promptly. "I'd've gotten it away from her much sooner," he told Chloe, "but I hadn't realized it was made out of the radioactive meteor rock until recently, and only how dangerous that might be a few years before that--"

"Wait, radioactive?!" Chloe said, glancing between them.

"It's not radioactive!" Lana shot right back angrily.

"It's more radioactive than anything else in the vicinity by several orders of magnitude, and I'll not be having any of my charges irradiating themselves or anyone else unnecessarily on my watch," Lex told her coldly, looking down his nose at her.

"...'Charges'?" Chloe echoed, looking bemused.

"He was babysitting us at the time," Lana said, crossing her arms in a huff. "Though I don't know how the hell he gets away with it," she added, with a nasty gleam in her eye.

Lex felt his spine stiffen. "Lana, don't you dare--"

"--because he isn't really any older than any of us," Lana challenged, tilting her head up imperially and smirking at him.

Lex started cursing under his breath.

"What?" Chloe said, looking startled.

Lex attempted to kick Lana under the table and missed.

Keeping her know-it-all smirk, Lana turned to Chloe and told her primly, "Alexander doesn't remember anything before he was nine. He only looks twenty. He's actually eleven."

"Eleven?!?" Chloe all-but-laughed.

"...I'm eleven," Clark muttered, looking downcast.

"No, you're fourteen," Lex corrected him. "--And I am twenty years of age," he protested sharply. "I wasn't acting like a baby after the meteor shower--"

"Says you."

"--and Clark can't remember either, and he's just fine, too. We've had developmental tests done for years now, and Clark's eleven by emotional maturity, more or less, and I'm at least thirteen now," Lex continued under his breath, hotly.

"Emphasis on least."

Chloe's eyebrows went up.

"And I'm much smarter than you, which more than makes up for any perceived lack!" Lex hissed out at Lana.

"Says you."

"You already said that! --And that isn't even an argument!"

"Says you."

"--Seriously though?" Chloe cut in, before Lex could lambast Lana for her nerve. "You're our age? --More or less?" she added quickly after Lex turned the full force of his glare on her.

"I've survived high school already, I should think that ought to count for something as far as my social development goes," Lex ground out. "My actions are perfectly acceptable for my physical age on the whole; leaps and bounds beyond a wholly-immature mere thirteen. And I'm far more responsible than the rest of you," he ended, sitting back with a huff.

"...You're thirteen," Chloe repeated slowly, as if thinking something over.

Lex's eyes narrowed.

"Sullivan, so help me god," Lex said with quiet intensity that had the three people at the table who knew him straightening their backs in reflex. "If you even think about going to Luthor or anyone else, suggesting that I don't have the testamentary capacity of an adult to make legal and binding decisions for myself, in an attempt to try to have my rights curtailed or a guardianship awarded, I will end you."

"They can't do that," Clark said, starting to freak out, his voice rising in volume. "They can't do that! They-- we've got paperwork that says you can, they can't do that! We--"

Lex reached out an arm, snagged Clark, and deftly pulled his little brother in a bit to snuggle up a little more against him. He petted Clark on the head, over and over again, until he started to calm down.

"Can't do that-- you're ours--" Clark muttered into Lex's shoulder, as Lex quietly hushed him.

"Of course not, Clark," Lex murmured to him as he rubbed circles on his little brother's back. "I'm not going anywhere."

Besides, if Luthor tried to challenge the court decision and grab him back...

...well, that's what hogs were for. He'd just have to pull the teeth out of Luthor's skull first, and grind them up elsewhere before adding them to the usual pigs' mash, so that he could be sure that no identifying bone pieces wouldn't be crunched down into small enough pieces to be completely unidentifiable if they made it through the pigs' digestive tracts.

Then Lex blinked for a moment as he remembered what his dad always said about killing people.

Primarily: don't do it.

Well, drat. He'd have to find some other way to handle the situation. It'd be harder, though.

...Hm. Maybe that was the sort of thing his dad meant when he was always talking on and on about means and ends?

Did all good ends need to have hard means, though? That seemed a little unfair...

"Wait. You're worried about Luthor trying to... what, adopt you back?" Chloe said, looking confused and almost amused, while Pete and Lana both had the grace to look differing levels of vaguely disturbed.

"No," Lex told her, "I am not." He let Clark pull away a bit, then had to tug at his hands to have him stop rubbing at his eyes. "Luthor might threaten to do so, but that simply won't happen." He stuck a hand in his back pocket and pulled out a clean white handkerchief, handed it over to his little brother. "I won't let it happen." He frowned over at her. "And I will be exceedingly displeased with anyone who was involved in the process."

"Nobody's doing anything like that to help out Luthor -- okay, Lex?" Pete said, putting up his hands, palms outward. "Nobody's stupid enough, and nobody would want to. Nobody in town even likes the guy."

Lex looked at Pete. Then he looked at Lana.

Then he peered at Chloe, very very carefully.

Chloe stared back.

Lex's eyes narrowed to slits.

Pete elbowed her.

"Ow, --what?!" Chloe said, scowling at Pete and rubbing her side.

"Say you'll keep it to yourself and stay out of it!" Pete told her under his breath.

"What? No! --Why?" Chloe said, and nearly got tackled by both Pete and Lana as Lex slammed his hands down on the table and shot to his feet.

Pete and Lana shoved themselves out of the booth in a flash, Chloe held securely between them.

"We're just gonna have a little talk with her for a second, okay?" Lana said with a weak smile, then a sideways glare at the offending bottle-blonde female as she and Pete dragged her off by the arms, protesting all the way.

Lex concentrated on regulating his breathing, then sat down again in a huff.

"I think I may hate that girl," Lex informed Clark, watching Chloe go.

"Me, too," Clark muttered, crossing his arms and looking more petulant than anything.

Lex glanced over at him. "You don't hate anybody."

Clark sighed and his shoulders drooped. "I know," he said sadly.

"It's fine," Lex told him, as he smoothed an errant bit of hair out of Clark's eyes. "You're just you."

And then the waitress came over and they ordered coffee and sweets.

Clark, of course, ragged on Lex for choosing chocolate over vanilla again.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex's eyes narrowed again when he saw Pete coming back without Lana or Chloe in tow.

"Dare I ask?" he said quietly.

Pete sat down, shaking his head. "It's fine. Lana's siccing her dad on her."

Lex stared at him levelly. "If her father were able to control her, I doubt she'd have grown up to be acting the way she does at present," he told Pete very lightly.

Pete stared at him.

"Okay," said Pete. "Now I know you're upset."

Lex shifted in his seat, then calmed a bit after resettling into the cushions behind him, once Clark had squashed himself up against his side again. "She showed up at my loft unannounced, stared at me rudely, called me a Luthor, and laughed at me when it became obvious that I didn't know what the hell she was talking about. She didn't explain; she went and dragged Luthor to the farm, instead." He felt his jaw clenching, so he stopped himself and took a long few shallow sips of his black coffee (decaf, house blend, two sugars, no cream).

Then he began again. "She made that three-ring circus happen, and when I recovered enough to come back downstairs after assaulting Luthor, she was sitting in the middle of the living room watching it all unfold out in front of her like it was one of those situational comedies on television, instead of somebody's life she'd just about destroyed. Mine."

"...Assaulting?" Pete said, staring at him. "You assaulted Luthor?"

Lex rolled his eyes. "I had a red-out in the barn loft. Nearly broke his nose, I think. Definitely bloodied it."

Pete grinned.

"Shut up," Lex sighed grumpily into his coffee cup.

"Are you kidding?" Pete said. "How is half the town not lining up to clap you on the back? Or totally jealous?"

Lex glanced up at him warily.

"...Luthor?" he said quietly, pointing to himself.

Pete looked breathtakingly angry for a moment, then shook his head roughly. He stole the other half of Lex's unfinished chocolate muffin, and said, authoritatively, "Look, you're not really a Luthor, right? You're a Kent." He took a bite of muffin, then added, muffledly, "Clark said you don't even remember the guy?"

"Don't eat with your mouth full, and yes," Lex said, passing a hand over his head. "I don't consider myself a Luthor, and I don't remember him at all." He paused. "Except for most of what happened yesterday."

Pete started to cough and motioned for something to drink, and Lex absently poured and passed him a cup of water from the ice-water pitcher at his left. "Are you happy he screwed over the town?" Pete asked him, only after managing to get the rest of the almost-stale muffin down the hatch by accompanying it with a full glass of water. "And still is?"

"No," Lex said quietly. "But it's not like there's anything I can do about it."

Pete gave out one final cough, then eyed him.

"Say that again, like you mean it," he was told.

Lex tried not to squinch up his face at Pete's tone. "Dad's reasons for hating him don't exactly make a whole lot of sense." At Pete's blank look of astonishment, Clark nodded in agreement next to him, which didn't help matters.

Pete glanced back and forth between the two of them, then got angry.

"Are you both our of your--!?" he hissed out under his breath. "--That was our factory!!"

"And your father and uncle sold it," Lex said, leaning forward and keeping his voice quiet as well. "They were paid for it, at the price quoted in the document they signed, weren't they?"

"Yes, but that's not--" he grimaced. "Luthor ruined the whole town!" Pete said, almost too angry to be coherent.

Lex and Clark were both watching him carefully.

"...What did he do that was so wrong?" Lex asked Pete.

Pete spluttered for a bit, then barely managed to compose himself after Clark passed him his own vanilla-bean muffin for a much-needed sugar boost.

"--He shut down the factory when he said he wouldn't!" Pete said firmly, jaw tensed hard as he chewed down roughly on the muffin, swallowed, and then shoved it away, too upset to even eat. "And then he screwed around and did stuff that made people have to sell him their houses super-cheap and move away from town broke, and--" Pete stopped.

And then the youngest Ross boy got a deer-in-the-headlights look for a second.

He drew himself up in his seat, shoulders raised, well and truly pissed off, but now for an entirely different reason.

"You--" He cursed them out. "You were doing one of your stupid social experiments on me just now, weren't you! You--"

Lex frowned. He couldn't help it.

"Behavioral study, to be precise," he told Pete. No reason not to -- and it wouldn't do any good to pretend otherwise. "You reacted very differently than my father did."

Pete abruptly stopped cursing. There was a beat during which Pete focused on him, his eyes narrowing slowly. "...And you're having trouble figuring out the difference."

Lex stared down at the table, then felt his eyelids begin to droop.

"--Oh no, you stay with us!" he heard Pete say, and Lex forced his eyes back open with a grimace.

"Sorry," Lex muttered, and he flexed his loosely interlaced fingers around his coffee cup a little more tightly. Maybe he shouldn't have gotten decaf, after all. "I think... dad was holding back. Something." He paused, staring at the table, feeling things slowly come into focus, but only so much. "There was something he knew but couldn't say. ...Wouldn't. --I'm not sure what or why."

"Lex?" Clark asked him quietly, but Lex shook his head slightly.

Then he frowned again.

"Pete," Lex said slowly. "Do honest people keep secrets?"

"Well, sure," Pete said, looking a little taken aback.

"From each other?"

Pete looked a little confused. "Well, yeah. Sometimes." He sounded less sure this time, and more suspicious, maybe even a little wary.

Then his face cleared. "Oh. You finally wondering why you got mad at me instead of your folks?" Pete asked him.

"--What?" Lex blurted out, looking up at him, startled.

Pete blinked at him, then seemed to mentally shrug it off. "You were all mad at me yesterday because you thought I knew you were adopted and didn't tell you, right?" he said.

Lex frowned furiously.

"No," he said. "I was mad because I thought you knew I was a Luthor, and because you hate Luthors," he informed Pete.

"Well, I don't," Pete said, then he grimaced. "I mean, I didn't know until you said-- ...forget it, it doesn't matter -- you're not a Luthor anyway, really," Pete snorted. "You're more of a Smallville-adoption, or something. Swapped at birth."

Lex rolled his eyes, while Clark stifled a giggle and in so doing poked him in the side as he raised a hand to cover his mouth.

"But Clark said you didn't yell at your parents for lying to you," Pete pressed, watching him right back. "You said you told your dad you understood why they didn't."

"So?"

Pete gave him a look. "So you went off at me for thinking I knew when I didn't, and for hating Luthor's when I know you aren't one."

"I said I was sorry about that."

"I know." Pete poured himself some more water. "But your dad hates Luthors, too," Pete pointed out with flawless accuracy, "and he even knew you were one," Pete told him. "And he didn't tell you, and you didn't get angry at him for--" Pete almost spilled his water glass as he looked up. "Oh, shi-- man, wait--"

Lex took a deep breath. Then another one.

He even felt pale.

"Lex?" Clark said worriedly, but Lex's brain was leaps and bounds ahead of him.

"Clark," Lex said slowly. "You remember what dad said about getting tied up with Luthor?" A nod. "Repeat it for me, please. Verbatim."

"--Okay, not what I was..." Pete said under his breath.

"Um," said Clark, and his face screwed up in concentration for a moment. Then he began:

"'Anyone I've seen who gets tied up with him always ends up somehow the worse for it. You don't know the man, and frankly I'd like to keep it that way. All right?'" Clark parroted dutifully, frowning slightly as he tried to make his voice sound exactly right from memory.

Across the table from them, Pete straightened in place.

"Okay," Lex said quietly, and Pete looked a little worried.

"What happened?" Pete asked.

"I don't know," Lex said quietly. "Do you think that he meant that I was the 'worse' for him getting tied up with Luthor, or that something else happened?"

The three of them all glanced around at each other, in full consensus:

Something else had happened.

Pete started cursing under his breath again.

Clark looked nervous.

"Do you think mom knows?" Clark asked.

"Maybe, but I doubt it," Lex said after a moment's thought. They both knew that there were some things that their dad had wanted him and Clark to keep amongst themselves and not tell mom. Mom had been in the room. Maybe...

"We'd have to catch him in the fields or the barn or something," Lex said. "Alone. No mom. Then ask. But..."

"I'm not sure I want to know," Clark said, hugging himself.

"...You guys are kinda screwed, aren't you?" Pete asked, glancing between them with something almost like sympathy.

Lex glanced up at him again, gauging.

Then he crossed his arms and leaned forward, elbows on the table.

"You've been awfully supportive since yesterday." Given yesterday.

Pete made a sour face and glanced away, looking v-e-r-y unconfortable.

"Dad talked to me some yesterday," Pete grudgingly admitted.

"What did he say?"

Pete grimaced, then said, "He told me to think about how I would feel, if he had just told me that I was Lionel Luthor's son."

Lex stared at him.

"Uh," Clark said.

Lex stared at him.

"Uh," said Clark.

Lex stared at him.

"...Um?" said Clark.

Lex closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"No, Clark," he informed his little brother, "Judge Ross did not have an affair with Luthor, and yes, Pete would look horribly silly with red hair."

"Um." said Clark, biting his lip so it came out almost a mumble, clearly visualizing something very specific now.

Lex opened his eyes in time to see Pete staring at them in complete horror.

And then Pete burst out laughing hysterically.

"Oh-- oh god--" Pete barely managed to choke out between peals of laughter. "Oh god, you utter bast-- Not funny!" he yelped out in-between spasms of choked-off coughs over snickering. "That is not--!"

Lex finished off his coffee at a leisurely pace, then poured himself some ice water from the nearly-empty pitcher, while Pete slowly regained control of himself.

"Aw, eff-you too, asshole," Pete told him, wiping at his eyes. "Fff--" He shuddered dramatically, then cursed good-naturedly for a bit, and then... "God, you suck," he reiterated, "with you and your stupid red..." He trailed off, then his eyes went a little wide. "Aw, hell, man. Your dad's not..."

"...of Irish descent, among other things." Lex shook his head. "DNA mismatches, I didn't catch it, I know; I should've known. I felt stupid about it already."

Pete blew out a breath, then scrubbed a hand over his face.

"Man, you've been having a shitty week all around, haven't you?" Pete said, wincing.

"You have no idea," Lex said cooly.

"He's getting money from Luthor, though," Clark said. "Or stock shares in LuthorCorp. Some inheritance thing."

Pete's head swiveled towards him and Lex was fixed with a look that had him grimacing.

"None of us knew about it," Lex said. "Something I was supposed to get when I turned eighteen, apparently, even if I had been an illegitimate bastard," and Lex watched while Pete rolled his eyes. "And he'll probably try and find a way to not pay out. So it's all academic, until it isn't."

"Well, you already punched him in the face, so duh."

Lex grimaced again and took a sip of water.

"Actually, he seemed to like Lex better after that," Clark offered tentatively.

"What the actual eff?" Pete said, staring.

Lex shrugged one shoulder at him.

"...Wait," Pete said, eyes narrowing in thought. "So if Chloe tells him you're not actually eighteen..."

Lex shrugged. Clark nodded.

"I don't really care all that much about the money, one way or the other," Lex told him. "But even if that becomes a non-issue, I get the feeling he'll just try something else to screw with me."

Pete looked at him askance.

"...I don't know," was all Lex could offer him, hunching his shoulders slightly. "It's just a feeling."

"Trust your gut, dude," Pete told him seriously, then sighed. "Any other observations you'd like to share with the class, Alex?" he added as he started to stand up, which was the usual, 'get your last shot in before we say goodbye, asshole.'

Lex relaxed a little bit, as he let himself absently muse over the last hour or so in greater detail.

Then Lex smiled.

"Chloe's really not your type," he told Pete, flicking his eyes up to him. "You may be crushing on her now, but I suggest you get over it as soon as you possibly can. Lana's the much better catch. I'd recommend you get in on the ground floor with her now before you hit high school, though. If she's still single then, she'll be obligated to start dating one of the top jocks instead, because you know she'll end up lead cheerleader, even as a ninth grader," Lex informed him over the rim of his coffee cup of water, eyes sparkling with mischief.

Pete froze.

"What the actual--?!" Pete yelped, wide-eyed.

"Oh, and welcome to puberty. Glad you could make it," Lex added sardonically, but feeling a bit of glee because now he'd have something even worse to tease Pete about, no contest.

Pete stared, then glared, and leveled a finger at him. "Shut the hell up."

But he also flushed furiously, and not in the angry way.

Lex grinned, then waved him goodbye languidly.

Pete grabbed his bookbag and got the hell out of dodge.

Ah, the benefits of having gone to high-school for the socio-behavioral observations, rather than the not-so-challenging coursework, Lex thought to himself smugly. Because he'd seen it all before.

...and when he had the time to actually think about it, he was even a good hand at parsing it all out correctly, too.

Clark just crossed his arms and sighed at him.

"Well, that went well," Lex murmured, as he took another sip of his water, then set it down and reached for his wallet. He tilted his head at Clark and looked at him sideways as he tossed down the requisite bills for payment.

Clark shrugged, then shook his head.

Lex just sighed. "Fine, no Plan B, either." Though how he'd prevent Chloe from communicating to Luthor without forcing some concoction down her throat to paralyze her vocal cords and breaking her fingers to prevent her from writing, Lex had no idea.

"You know mom and dad hate it when I get creative," he griped to his little brother as they both got up and out of their booth.

"...Maybe we could just go talk to her for awhile first?" Clark asked hopefully.

"Talk at her, you mean," Lex corrected him.

"Pleeeease?"

And Clark did the Doe-Eyed Clark.

...

...

Lex sighed, deeply.

One of these days, I'm going to have to build up an immunity to that...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex would have been, well, not exactly happy to talk with-or-at Chloe Sullivan, but he would have done it, for Clark.

Her father, however, had other ideas.

"Stay the hell away from my daughter!" Mr. Sullivan told Lex, in no uncertain terms, and slammed the door in his face.

Lex blinked.

He turned to Clark, who was standing on the Sullivan's front porch right next to him.

"Wow," Clark said, wide-eyed. "That's gotta be a new record."

Lex slowly lowered his fist. He hadn't been expecting that so soon. He hadn't even gotten the chance to knock before the door had opened and he'd been told off.

"So much for Plan C," Lex said under his breath. He turned back to the door and crossed his arms across his chest, frowning at the cheap, white-painted door.

"What do you think Lana said to him?" Clark asked in wonder, as they both turned and clomped back down the stairs of the front porch. (Well, Clark clomped down; Lex just walked.)

Lex just shook his head and grimaced. "Nothing good." And so much for that idea, and the next several ideas that he'd had. He flipped through the possibilities in his mind, one after the other, and the number of viable plans he had left was depressingly low.

"Why would she do that," Clark said quietly, frowning to himself as he walked along next to Lex.

"I don't know, Clark," Lex sighed. "But she's made it very difficult to resolve this situation anything like peacefully, if it was her." And, given the likelihood of who all else could have given him a proper warning (read: very few), and the fact that Pete had said that she was going to talk with Mr. Sullivan about things... "And it probably was her."

"...Maybe she doesn't like Chloe either?" Clark put out there, looking up at him.

"Maybe." It seemed unlikely to him that Lana might like Chloe less than him, though. He doubted she'd trust him to try and keep things relatively harmless, in planning revenge. There... might be more than a few things that had happened in town that could not quite be traced back to him, or even attributed to human action (or inaction) at all, let alone proven. Lana was one of the very few people who knew enough to suspect him to be the author of certain infamous, let alone ignominious, events, though. And of the things he knew that she knew, none of them exactly lent themselves to suggest any undue restraint on his part.

Lex glanced back at the house from beyond the fence. He frowned slightly when he thought he saw Chloe in a bedroom window for a moment...

He stared at the house for awhile, then turned away. One thing was clear -- he obviously wasn't going to be talking to-or-with Chloe anytime soon, not with her father playing interference at the door. The girl likely wasn't planning on coming down and out anytime soon, either, for anything other than school.

"What do we do now?" Clark asked his older brother as he closed the gate to the faded white picket fence behind them.

Lex stopped on the sidewalk next to him. "I'm not sure," he mused. "Pretty much all of my plans that don't involve physical violence require me to actually be able to talk to people." Threats -- or promises of impending nontrivial harm -- weren't exactly useful if he didn't actually get to communicate them to the person in question who was seriously pissing him off.

Lex took a deep breath in and let it back out again slowly, running a hand over his head. As much as he didn't like to admit it, he was stumped. He needed to take a step back and have a serious brainstorming session to come up with some new ideas.

They exchanged glances.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was perched on a stool in the middle of the Ross' kitchen.

Clark was hovering nearby at his right shoulder, shifting from foot to foot.

They were both staring at Pete's little sister, Kathy, who was sitting on her own kitchen stool across from them.

"Well?" Lex asked her. "What do you think?"

Kathy crossed her arms. "I think Lana really wants to be your nemesis."

Lex rolled his eyes. "Why must I keep endlessly repeating myself?" Lex asked the ceiling rhetorically. "I keep telling people; that's not happening."

Kathy gave him a look. "I still think--"

"No!" Lex said, throwing up his hands. "I used to babysit her, for god's sake! I know all her weak points. It wouldn't be fair. Or right," he grumbled. "End of discussion." He made a face. "Besides, I only ever want one nemesis, and that's going to be Clark," he muttered under his breath. Not that she hadn't ever heard it before.

Kathy blew out a long sigh. "You could at least use her for practice--"

"No," said Lex.

Kathy stuck out her tongue at him, and he eyed her and made a quick swipe for it before she pulled it back in.

"Ought to show me a bit more respect," Lex said cooly, straightening.

"I'm your number 1; I get to do things like that," she shot right back just as cooly. "That's half the perks package right there."

They eyed each other for a long moment or two, with mirrored stances -- arms crossed, straight-backed, cool assessing stares exchanged -- then both broke out into identical grins.

Pete wandered into the kitchen, glanced over at them, said, "Hey Clar--" and came to a screeching halt. He took one look at the white lab coat his little sister was wearing and did a 180-degree turn, stomping right back out again.

"MOM!" the three of them heard him yell. "SHE'S BEING EXTRA-EVIL AGAIN!"

"Pete, don't discourage your sister's hobbies!" they heard Mrs. Ross call back in response from farther inside the house. "And she's not evil, just misunderstood."

Lex bit his lip to hold back a laugh, while Kathy just looked all kinds of put-out.

"I'm totally evil," she muttered to herself, hunching in her chair, as her mom walked into the kitchen.

"Of course you are, dear," Mrs. Ross told her, tussling her hair a bit on the way to the fridge.

"Mooooooom," Kathy complained, squirming in place. "Quit embarrassing me in front of my boss!" she hissed at said motherly figure.

"Chocolate-chip cookies all right with everyone?" Mrs. Ross asked, blithely ignoring her daughter's acute embarrassment in the way only a mother could, as she started pulling out ingredients to do just that.

"Yes, Mrs. Ross," Lex and Clark both chimed in response.

"...Fine," Kathy said a bit more petulantly, crossing her arms and hunching down a little more as she glared at the floor, and Lex was proud of her. --She'd held out almost a full three seconds that time. An impressive feat of self-control in the face of impending chocolate-chip cookies.

Mrs. Ross smiled at her youngest, leaned over, and gave her a quick peck on the forehead.

Kathy scowled.

"When I grow up," Kathy announced bloodily, "I will totally be the most evil person to break the laws of man and nature ever."

"That's nice, dear," Mrs. Ross told her. "Just make sure that you listen to what Lex tells you to do and never get caught, so I don't have to see you in my courtroom," she calmly told his minion #1, who took great pride and joy in the fact that she had that job.

...Not that Clark couldn't be his minion #1, mind you, instead of just being a part-time minion on-call. No, Lex just didn't want to risk stunting his development in other areas. Minioning was a 24-7 job, for starters, and Clark was supposed to grow up to be his nemesis, after all. It behooved him to work for Lex at least a little bit of the time, to know what the 'other side' was like -- so he'd be more effective at his job later once he was finished growing up and all -- but he really needed to keep his options open, so Lex made sure to carefully limit his hours. Minioning required a very particular mindset, and it was more a way of life and a lifestyle if done right.

Clark needed to be a lot more flexible than that if he was going to be Lex's nemesis properly. ...Eventually. They weren't exactly rushing things, and Lex was more of an "unaffiliated mad" scientist than a "good or "bad" one at-present, anyway.

Kathy, on the other hand, was coming along nicely, if not outright flourishing, and was really wanting to push the envelope much faster and harder than even Lex was completely prepared to deal with at times.

...Well, a little bit of the time, anyway. He usually kept her away from the white lab coats in self- and world-defense, except for a special treat or for emergencies. Like today.

Kathy flushed badly at her mother's completely lack of worry over her impending evilitude. "I mean it," she said in threatening tones. "I'll do it. I'll totally Break The Law." At her mother's lack of response, she added hotly, "--I'm gonna break every law ever, just you wait! And the really important ones twice!"

"I look forward to it," Mrs. Ross told her youngest with calm approval, as she measured off cookie-making flour into a mixing bowl.

"I found out about jaywalking yesterday and I did it twice; that totally counts." Minion #1 muttered to herself with an angst usually reserved for teenagers rather than fifth graders as Lex looked on. He was so proud.

"So," Lex said, steepling his fingers in front of him. "Back to the matter at hand."

Minion #1 straightened, then glanced up at Clark.

Lex also looked up at Clark, and then something occurred to him.

After an exchange of looks, and a quick game of rock-paper-scissors that Lex arbitrated and Clark lost, Clark's shoulders drooped and he sighed.

"Okay, fine," Clark said, grumpy at getting the more boring assignment. "I'll go distract Pete to make sure he doesn't try to foil your latest plans," and trudged off into the living room.

Kathy tilted her head to watch Clark walk by, then turned back to her boss. "Huh?" she said.

Understandable, given that Pete didn't usually try to foil their plans -- though Pete did usually need distracting, or they'd never get anything done with all his carrying on about horrible evil little sisters and such. (Not that Pete was wrong, exactly... But. Lex had scientifically proven that any intermittent white-labcoat-wearing-induced evil was just a temporary evil at best, for goodness' sake. Pete really needed to get over it sometime, or he'd never make it out of tenth grade science alive, once he made it that far.)

Lex never had to worry about Mrs. Ross telling anyone about their plans, though, or even trying to foil them. She was cool like that. (Sometimes, when they got really desperate, she even helped.)

"Your youngest brother may find foiling our plans in his interest today on the account of temporary insanity, because he has discovered male hormones," Lex informed his #1 loftily. "Pete may-or-may-not be sexually interested in both Lana and Chloe." He paused. "Possibly not at the same time; I doubt he's thought of that yet."

Kathy snickered.

"You may mock him at your leisure later," Lex told her, waving a hand at her imperially. "Right now, we need to focus on The Chloe Problem."

"Right," she nodded once and crossed her arms seriously.

Lex shared about a half minute of fingers-steepled, thought-filled silence with her, before he said, "Is it possible that Chloe might be angling to be my nemesis?"

Kathy recrossed her arms, tilted her head this way and that, then looked up at him.

"You think?" she asked Lex, frowning.

Lex stopped and thought about it seriously for a long moment. It had merely been a tangent off of her idea about Lana earlier, and he'd really mostly said it just to start their brainstorming session going, but thinking on it further...

"...Maybe."

Kathy scowled.

"Are you going to let her get away with that?" his minion demanded of him. Then she looked like she was thinking over what he and Clark had relayed to her when they'd first come in and sat down, and her scowl got worse and worse. "I mean, she challenged you! In your own home!"

"I suppose she did," Lex said mildly, leaning back on his stool. He was still engrossed in poking at the original thought from all angles. Could Chloe be a potential nemesis of the mad-scientist type? And did her choice of known-aligned companionship place her more on the side of good, or of evil?

('Behavior' and 'morals' were too flexible to use for comparison; as Lex understood it from his own reading, being "good" tended to excuse a lot of otherwise "bad" behavior, and the victors wrote the history books however they wanted, anyway. But, when push came to shove, you could always count on the social clicks to make life's little classification challenges a lot easier. "Good" people tended to expel "bad" people from their presence with almost alarming frequency and ease, one way or the other; "bad" people did the same with "good" ones. Similarly with the "jocks", the "geeks", the winners and losers at life -- not necessarily in that order, mind you -- and everyone else in-between.)

Very few managed to stand out from the crowd like Lex did and not suffer horrendous negative social consequences for doing so. (Lex had figured that one out early-on, and had firmly secured a lack of social consequences for himself shortly thereafter. ...On an unrelated note largely due to a lack of any evidence that might suggest otherwise, some "jocks" had gotten to suffer their own "horrendous consequences" shortly after that.)

Still fewer of those who fell outside the usual social hierarchy were able to circulate with any and every group regardless of their social status, or lack thereof. (Lex was still getting the hang of that one -- not that he was bad at it. God, no! Just the opposite: it surprised him how very good he was at it. He just forgot to do it, more often than not. Social butterfly, Lex was not.)

Chloe was new in town; Lex had no idea what her previous social status might have been. If he was trying to place her on what he did know, though, he'd have to depend on his, Clark's, Lana's, and Pete's reactions to her. And that was kind of a losing proposition; none of them really belonged to any of the normal social groups.

Case-in-point: Lana was a cheerleader because she wanted to be, but she wasn't actually cheerleader material. If she decided to really put her mind to it, she probably could and would become someone's nemesis someday. Just not his. (Though even thinking about trying to guess whether she'd end up on the side of chaos or justice made Lex's head hurt. She really could go either way, or just decide to thumb her nose at everyone and straddle the line...)

He was getting off-topic. Chloe was the one causing the immediate problems for him here, not Lana. (Or at least, he was fairly sure that Lana wasn't trying to cause him any more problems than usual. Regardless...) Could Chloe's actions towards him really be considered a challenge?

"You 'suppose'?" Kathy made a rude noise, then pointed out, "Boss, Lana's one thing, but this Chloe-girl's an outsider!" she protested.

"She may not realize that's what she's been doing..." Lex said, attempting to play devil's advocate, but it was a weak defense for her at best, and he knew it. Lana ought to have explained that part to her, at the very least. Even explaining it to her father should have been enough, given the girl's proclivity for eavesdropping.

"Did she apologize at all?" his minion pressed him. "Ever? Even once?"

Lex pulled a face.

"Okay," Kathy said, eyes narrowing. She shifted on her chair in front of him like she was digging in. "Did she at least try and let ya know that she wasn't gonna do it again?"

Lex sighed, and said something that he hadn't wanted to say in front of Clark. "She may have pulled a second-floor curtain aside and stuck her tongue out at me as we left the place. It was a bit hard to tell, but..."

"Oh, boss," Kathy said, cracking her knuckles on each hand, one then the other, and looking intent on causing a particular somebody some really nasty pain in some really unpleasant ways.

Lex gave her a long look.

"Coat off," Lex ordered with an accompanying hand motion. He knew full well when she was reaching her limits.

His Minion #1 grumbled, but she did it. And, once she'd folded it up and handed it over to him carefully, she blushed slightly and slumped back down on her stool a bit more naturally for a female fifth grader.

"Think she's a Girl Scout?" she asked, looking down at her hands and playing almost nervously with her fingers.

"I very much doubt it," Lex told her, as he finished placing it back in the cupboard above the refrigerator, shoved the combination lock through the handles, and forced it shut.

Kathy made a noise of acknowledgment, and they both sat down and took a short break to devour the cookies that Mrs. Ross had just set out on a plate beside them, along with two cold glasses of milk.

"Thank you, Mrs. Ross," Lex told her, which belatedly prompted a "Thanks, mom," from his #1.

"You're welcome," she told them both with a smile, and took up a tray to, presumably, Clark and Pete in the living room.

"Girl's a menace," Kathy mumbled through a mouthful of cookie crumbs. "If she does this kinda garbage to you, what's she gonna do to every-body else in town?"

That brought Lex some pause. "...You think?" he asked. "She hasn't seem inclined to cause problems for other people-not-me."

"Chh," said Kathy. "She practically got Lana and Pete in trouble with you at the Beanery because she wasn't agreeing to stop, right?"

Lex hesitated, and suppressed a wince. "I'm not sure I'd put it like that--"

"Did she know she didn't get them in trouble with you from the stuff she saw you do?" Kathy rephrased. "And did she care?"

Lex pursed his lips.

"No," he had to admit. "No, I don't believe she knew." It would have required Lana or Pete to defend him in his behavior at least once, with a follow-up explanation along with it, and neither of them had had a reason -- let alone the general inclination -- to do so. "And she seems to enjoy watching the consequences as they happen to other people, if that's what you mean by caring," he added bitterly.

"So she likes messing with people and doesn't care about the fallout," Kathy reasoned. She bit down on a cookie and chewed. "That makes her a lot more dangerous than if she's just taking potshots at you, y'know," she mumbled out pointedly.

"Hm," said Lex. He saw what she was getting at, and admittedly the 'innocent bystanders' argument was one generally better used on Clark rather than him, but...

Lex turned it a bit sideways, and looked at it on a slant.

And then he thought about it for awhile.

"...Boss?"

Lex lowered his cookie and propped his head up on a fist.

"So she doesn't care about what happens to anybody else in town, as a result of her own actions, does she?" he said reflectively, as if the question was an academic exercise, while turning the cookie he held over, and over, in front of him, slowly.

Kathy froze in place for a moment, then looked up at him and waited.

Lex turned to her. "Do you think we can use that?" he asked her, with a deceptively soft smile, and a very, very hard glint in his eye.

His minion stared at him.

And then she grinned widely.

Because it had been a rhetorical question.

"Cookies first, then planning," Lex commanded her, taking a bite of his own.

His minion was happy to comply.

~*~*~*~*~*~

When the shit really hit the fan, Mr. Sullivan was so pleased with Lex that he, well...

He wasn't. Pleased. That Lex had hauled his daughter off to court.

To be fair, she had started it. Lex was just finishing it.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~*~*~

A week from when Lex had last talked to Chloe that frustrating afternoon in the Beanery, and then been thwarted in his attempt to threaten her in her own home later that day by her enabling father, Lex decided it was once again time to be seen in a place in town whereupon he might be accosted by the general public. Or one Chloe Sullivan.

Lex had had a mostly-uneventful week spent at home, still-banned from his college classes for the interim due to the mental toll that his 'excused family emergency' was enacting upon him. It had been somewhat more restful than he'd expected it to be, all things considered.

Unfortunately, he'd been unable to properly concentrate until the weekend, which had led to a mountain of coursework that he'd had to make up all-at-once. So he counted himself lucky that he was finally able to concentrate properly again by that weekend, and, in a monumental effort, managed to make up all the homework and reading that he'd fallen behind on over the course of the entire week -- including the course notes that some very nice classmates of his had copied and-or otherwise donated to him for his use, that covered each individual lecture that he'd missed.

Monday had been a flurry of activity in which, in-between classes and the handing in of makeup work and the scheduling of makeup sessions for the labs that he'd missed, he'd spread about baked goods, apologies, and thanks in liberal measure to all and sundry who'd been a help to him over that period of time, tangentially or otherwise. By Tuesday, barring the two lab sessions he'd missed, he was all caught up again -- even on his music class homework -- and back in the swing of things. Life was good, or at least as good as it usually was for him.

And now, it was Tuesday afternoon, and he was sitting in the Beanery once again, at their (read: his, Clark's, and Pete's) usual table, waiting for middle school classes to let out for the day.

He'd been mentally and emotionally preparing himself for the past week for this, bit-by-bit. Even so, it still didn't quite work out as he'd expected.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark arrived first, as usual. As did Pete.

Lex raised his eyebrows quite a bit when Emily Dinsmore showed up with Lana Lang in tow. Not that that was surprising in and of itself; the two of them crashed the Beanery after school together on a rather frequent basis. No, what was surprising was what happened next. Emily grabbed a chair for Lana and pulled it up into the aisle next to their table before sitting down next to Pete. She indicated -- without even a follow up glance to press the point -- that Lana take the chair next to them, and Lana did so without protest.

Lex looked around at their current arrangement -- Pete and Emily across the table from him, himself in the far corner, and Lana and Clark basically guarding access to his person -- and grimaced slightly. He stood, and motioned with his hands that they all stand up.

They all got up and moved to the somewhat-more-cushiony chairs in the center of the room.

...Including Lana, again without protest. She did it with an almost aloof air, as if it was not a mere grudging duty of some sort on her part, but rather a social privilege that was rightly expected of her and that she would perform to the utmost perfection. This floored Lex a bit.

When he'd gotten a little more composure back, after they'd all put in their drink orders and had received their beverages in turn, Lex finally built up the nerve to say, "Dare I ask how much you told Chloe and her father last Tuesday, that had him barring all entry to his home and access to his daughter?" And subsequently preventing the resolution of all conflict well-prior to this point?

Lana pulled her feet up under her and her lips curled upwards into a faintly catty smile as she cupped her hands around her warm coffee cup. "I think maybe you should be asking me what I didn't tell them," she said smugly, as she raised the beverage to her lips. "It'd be a lot faster." She swallowed and licked her lips, like she'd caught and eaten the proverbial canary with whipped cream on top.

Lex felt a facial tic start up, and he rubbed his palm against his cheekbone to try and smooth it away. He noted that he should probably try to run through the mental litany of choice words he had for her as quickly as possible, because that'd make it a hell of a lot easier to unclench his jaw that much sooner and untense in general, even moreso without disastrous consequences. It'd be far more efficient than throttling her out in the open and trying to get away with it, anyway.

"Lana!" Emily chided her. She sighed and turned to Lex. "Don't mind her; she's being all... what d'you usually call it...? --Right, facetious again," she told him as she waved Lana off. "The short version is: she didn't tell them anything, she just told them who they should talk to to get told everything."

"...Nosy Nell?" Clark said, with a sinking tone that pretty well matched what Lex was feeling in his gut just then. Then they both winced at the sidelong and narrow-eyed look Lana gave them, as she always did when they dared utter that nickname for her aunt in her presence. --This was because only Lana was allowed to call her that. Everyone else had to get in line, or get written permission from Lana to do it.

(Admittedly, while she and Clark had been friends forever, and that usually granted by default that lofty status to such individuals and their family members, Clark was Lex's brother. And while Clark did things that she liked enough to give them permission to do that, Lex kept doing things that she disliked often enough that she kept tearing up their permission slips mere seconds after their being awarded to them -- hours at most.)

So this led to Clark mumbling a 'sorry' at her for the rightly-descriptive nickname slipping out like that when he wasn't supposed to be using it, while Lex sat where he was and refused to apologize for agreeing with the sentiment, as was his usual modus operandi.

"Fine," Lex opted to say instead. "Dare I ask why you don't like Chloe, then?"

Lana all but glared at him, then looked away, out the window and onto the street. "She's annoying," Lana said. "And while you're totally unrepentant about what 'just myst-e-r-i-ously happens' to people you're getting even with, when you think they deserve it--" which had Lex smiling at her smugly and her glaring at him again for a moment, because the point was a longstanding argument and offense between them. But then she sighed and looked away again and added, "-- if you do something stupid and bad things happen to other people that you didn't mean to have happen, you do feel bad about it, and apologize afterwards, and try to make things right, and not do it again. ...Accidentally." Which was true enough.

"Whereas Chloe doesn't even feel bad, let alone try to fix things, when she does the same," Lex ended for her, which from where he was standing was also true.

"No, I really don't think she does," Lana agreed with a frustrated frown, then grimaced a bit. "I may not necessarily like you all that much, most of the time, but you're ours," she told him outright, far more succinctly than he had ever heard prior.

"She likes you some times," Emily put out there with a patient sort of mildness as she sipped at her green tea, something which had Lana whipping her head back around both fast and hard.

"--And a lot of times I don't!" Lana added in very terse tones, after glaring her best friend into, if not quite submission, at least a smiling silence. "I am allowed to change my mind whenever. I. want." Lana bit out through clenched teeth.

Lex blinked at this pronouncement. "Of course you are," he said without judgment, as he slowly glanced between Emily, who was looking very zen just then, and Lana, who was just about spitting mad and bristling at her. Frankly, he didn't see how such a thing could ever be a subject of contention between rational, thinking beings. "Why wouldn't you be?"

Emily gave him no reply, but for some reason his agreement on the subject of the freedom to change one's own mind(...?) completely relaxed Lana. Her hands relaxed their grip from around the arms of her chair, and she settled back down into the cushions, returning to her calm and out-of-the-usual, markedly-obvious social support of him in his position.

Lex glanced between them once more, then closed his eyes briefly as he mentally shook himself. He knew he was missing something, but he also knew that he didn't have the time to figure this one out just then. It'd have to wait for later.

"You."

...Yes. Much, much later. Lex opened his eyes and turned his head upwards to peer at--

"Why, would you look at that," Lex said lightly, turning away from the newly-arrived to address the group. "Miss Sullivan is here." He absently wondered how much she had heard from before, as he picked up his coffee cup from the table next to him. Well, no matter. It's not as if any of it was horribly damning, let alone anything she could really use against me. In a bad way. "You know, I distinctly remember her father telling me that he does not want me talking to her," he continued to muse out loud, to all and sundry. "I wonder what she is doing here today. Has he changed his mind, perhaps?"

"No," said Chloe. "You are supposed to leave me alone."

Lex took a sip of his drink. "Mm, you know, I do believe he would have said something to me, personally, if he had changed his mind. It's not as if I was unavailable at any point last week, being home on the farm for the full duration, and all. Staying away from his daughter. It's too bad, because if he had said something to me, to the effect of rescinding his previous statement to the contrary, why, I might be able to resolve the situation she finds herself currently enmired within, were I able to discuss things with her, in an adult and reasonable manner. Far be it from me, though, to blatantly ignore such a forceful and heartfelt request from a member of her own family." He leaned back in his chair and pulled a faux-remorseful face. "Pity, that. So sad."

"Call them off," Chloe said flatly.

"So very, very sad," Lex repeated, as if he hadn't heard her.

"Call them off," Chloe repeated.

"I wonder if I should leave the premises," Lex added. "After all, 'staying away' likely means any sort of physical proximity, but, then again, I was here first... Does that seem fair, that I should be the one go? Maybe she should leave instead."

"This isn't funny!" Chloe said heatedly, sounding more than a little desperate now.

"I just don't know. It's such a quandary," Lex said casually, shaking his head.

"Lex, honestly!" Lana said, tossing. "Do you have to ignore her?"

"Why, Lana!" Lex said in a scandalized tone. "Don't you know that the spirit of 'staying away' from someone also includes the avoidance of conversation with that person?" he asked. "And I'd just hate for Mr. Sullivan to be displeased with me for misunderstanding his intent," he added. "Not talking to her really does seem like the safest course of action for me," he ended, blinking at Lana with his most innocent look ...which admittedly wasn't very.

"God, what are we, nine?" Lana asked rhetorically, giving Lex a disgruntled look as he took another sip of his coffee, and frowning further when she realized he was fighting down a grin while doing so.

"Make him stop," Chloe said more loudly, and it was obvious without even needing to look at her that she was addressing all of his friends and associates gathered there.

"Hey, nine I can do," Emily said with a twisted smile and a sideways glance at Lana that was full of mischief. She straightened in place, cleared her throat loudly, then gamely asked, "So, Lex, I'm kinda curious. What exactly did you do to get even this time? --With Chloe," she added as an aside.

"Why, Emily," Lex said, putting a hand to his chest. "Are you accusing me of some sort of wrongdoing?"

"Nooo, Lex," Emily sing-songed at him. "We all know that you neeeever do anything to get back at aaaaaanyone eeeever."

"And he'd better never get caught at what he 'isn't doing' either, because we'll probably all end up going down for it," Pete muttered with a praying look towards the heavens.

"--Says you," Lana shot back.

Clark winced again, though he was smiling weakly just a bit at the interchange, while Lex by contrast struggled to keep down a laugh.

"Aaaaand now that we have established your general innocence in all matters vengeful," Emily said. "...What did you do?"

Lex bit his lip, feeling almost too giddy for words. "Emily, goodness, I am shocked, shocked that you hadn't heard!" He set down his coffee on the low table between them to get both his hands free -- the better to steeple them with as he leaned back in his chair. "I did..." He paused for effect, then spread his hands and grinned maniacally. "Absolutely nothing."

Everyone stared at him like he was a bit nuts, except for Clark, who looked a bit uncomfortable, and Chloe, who said, heatedly, "No, you didn't!!"

"Yes, absolutely nothing," Lex repeated smugly, still grinning up a storm, because, really, he was so very proud of himself for this one.

"...No, really," Emily said.

Lex crossed his arms and nodded at her triumphantly.

Chloe made a noise of frustration next to him.

"Oh, this is gonna be bad, isn't it," Pete muttered under his breath, wincing already. Ah, Pete knew him so well!

"Um," said Emily, clearly not getting it at first -- and why would anyone, due to the sheer tangled-up brilliance of his plan? After all, it had been even more effective than even he could ever had expected. "Explanation please?" he was further asked.

"Certainly," Lex said magnanimously, pointing a finger at her, before re-steepling his hands. "You see, Emily, Chloe may not realize this -- possibly never having had friends, acquaintances, or even neighbors of the sort that I have been so privileged to have -- due to her having spent the majority of her formative years growing up in the cesspit of a city that is Metropolis." Lex dutifully ignored both Clark's grimace -- because this was his explanation, not Clark's -- and also Chloe's strangled whatever-noise-that-was that she made just then. "But, apparently it is not such an uncommon occurrence for most people -- who are not-just-me, by the way -- that, when a friend of theirs has been hurt or otherwise unduly injured in some manner by the actions of some other third party, that they do not like it. And sometimes get angry about it. And, in some people's cases, decide that they are, in fact, angry enough to actually do something about it."

"And you told them to do things! Make them stop!!" Chloe insisted at his ear, her voice wavering dangerously close to cracking across the multiple registers that she covered, that ended in a near-shriek.

"...Still not following how this wasn't you," Emily said for the benefit of the shrieking third-party-in-question.

"Well, I did nothing," Lex smiled gleefully. He really couldn't believe how nobody seemed to be getting it. Maybe this was why the Sullivans had -- obviously -- never seen it coming. "I didn't tell anyone to do anything. ...I also didn't tell anyone not to do anything either." He grinned.

Pete got it first, being a family-friend of many, and thus used to seeing members of his family being called upon in this very self-same manner from time to time.

"Oh, it is bad," Pete muttered again, bowing his head and rubbing his hands over his face.

"You implied--" Chloe ground out.

"--I didn't even have to imply anything," Lex said, cutting her off without even so much as glancing up at her. "It's just karma, I suppose."

"Hah," said Lana neutrally.

"--I don't mean karma for me," Lex elaborated, shooting Lana a glance. "Necessarily. Rather, I think it's more karma for the Sullivans, who seem to think that isolating themselves from the rest of the town is a good thing, for some reason," he ended lightly.

"You're the one doing the isolating!" Chloe said angrily. "We can't even buy milk from the store! Practically nobody will sell us anything! We had to drive to Granville for groceries last week!"

"I guess people just know me, and my reputation for fairness--"

Lana snorted.

"--and how I don't generally go about doing things, or not doing them, without a very good reason--"

Emily smiled and glanced over at Clark, who looked vaguely embarrassed.

"--and saw that, this time, my way of dealing with things was going to be not doing anything--"

"...Oh god," Pete said quietly.

"--and, given that I have tended to help a lot of different people with a lot of different things in town, on various and sundry occasions--"

"...Really, really bad," Pete said to himself, staring at Clark, who was and had been, as a good part-time minion, purposefully very quiet about the whole thing. Even Emily was starting to look a little queasy as it really hit them, as the people who knew him all began to truly understand exactly what had happened, and what Lex hadn't done.

"--and that my help is apparently very highly valued by most of our friends, neighbors, and acquaintances in town," Lex continued on for Chloe's benefit, "...Or, at least, more highly-valued than what they think the Sullivans can or will give them, during their stay in town," with perfectly sound logic that was about as devastating in its conclusion as a high-speed train bearing down on a pair of Sullivans that were either too stupid or simply too foolish to move themselves out of the damn way. "So, when I got more than a few house calls this week -- from people not the Sullivans, mind you --"

"Oh, you didn't," Lana said quietly. Emily, on the other hand, just gave out a low whistle in awe at both the sheer audacity and utter simplicity of his oh-so-brilliant master plan.

"-- who were, by the way, a lot more sympathetic for me in my situation than I'd expected, given my apparent biological parentage and how much people seem to hate Luthor in town..." Lex mused, then shook his head and got back on track. "Well, it was kind of hard for me not to act as distraught as I actually still was, under the circumstances, and I certainly didn't feel as though I ought not set the record straight on, well, some things, at least--"

"Oh, he did," Emily said back, just as quietly.

"--I mean, did you know that some people had heard about this inheritance that I'm supposedly supposed to get, and think that means that Luthor's giving me the town plant? Or think that I should ask for that instead of the Luthorcorp stock? Apparently some people actually think that's a good idea and want me to run it!" The thought blew his mind -- and not just a little bit, either. The responsibility involved was just... and they wanted to trust him with it? God, he couldn't imagine what that might say about Mr. Sullivan. ...Or maybe Lionel Luthor. Though having someone who lived in town and who wasn't hated, if not reviled by all and sundry, being the one owning the plant might be the larger concern there, Lex supposed.

"Well, it'd certainly help keep you out of trouble," Lana said.

"But, me?" Lex repeated. "I mean, I do alright for myself, I guess, but... to expand from, well, what I'm doing now with my limited resources, to managing some twenty-five-hundred-odd people?" Right now what he was doing in his secret-labs for himself, and elsewhere for other people, was hardly what Lex would call a real business; besides, he only had two people in his employ, and it was almost too much for him to handle as it was. --Well, okay, technically two-and-a-half people, since he also employed himself, and Clark was really just part-time. "Even if I somehow managed to do a good job of it, I wouldn't have time to do that and my coursework, let alone anything else!"

"I think that's kind of exactly what she was thinking, Lex," Emily told him with a slight smile, glancing over at Lana. "That you'd have no more time for the 'everything else'."

"Tch, don't be ridiculous." Lex slumped back in his chair and pulled a face. Like he'd give up all of his beautiful Science for managerial work to run a piddling factory. "Don't even know what I'd do with that much fertilizer, even if I did end up with the factory somehow," Lex muttered, rubbing at his left temple. "It's not like it's the best starting material for anything, and I don't need that many low-grade explosives in the near-term." Then he realized that he'd somehow let himself get completely off track again. "Anyway, that's not the point."

"...You've got a point?" Lana said, being brattish.

Lex shot her a look, before continuing. "The important, most relevant thing is that there were a few times -- not many, but a few -- when people asked me outright if I wanted them to do something, to express some small part of their own displeasure at what had happened in some form, on my behalf. Some people even asked me if I'd stop helping them with their problems if they associated with the Sullivans in any way -- why, what an interesting notion, don't you think? So many questions, and so much worry, and all for my sake." Lex smiled a very firm, very mad scientist smile. Knowing that he had been -- and still was, despite his ignominious Luthorian status, it seemed! -- a species apart in the social strata of the town was one thing. But this? This had been a whole different beast altogether!

Lex took in a deep breath. "However, when it came time to answer those oh-so-very-interesting questions, I simply... didn't reassure them that I would not be so petty as to not decide to, in the future, not do anything when it came to them, too, if they did associate with the Sullivans in any way. I didn't ask anyone... not to express their outrage on my behalf. I didn't tell anyone to do anything, and I didn't tell anyone not to do anything." Lex smirked. "I was just a bit less forthcoming on those particular questions. For those questions, I didn't tell them anything, one way or the other. I simply let a lot of very concerned people draw their very own conclusions, and make their own choices, without any input at all from me."

Lex paused, then added reflectively, "Of course, I can understand why even my passing-associates were concerned, though. After all, I don't have to help anyone, outside of my family, even if I've tended to come to fair bargains with people to do just that, as a matter of course in the past. And, with everything that's been going on, I'm certain to be far more distracted in the future, with everything that's already come about due to Luthor's recent and completely unexpected insertion into my life. I'll feel obligated to finish anything I'm working on, and have already promised in the short-term, of course, but who knows how much time I'll have to take on new projects even a few months from now, or longer? Especially while I'm having to deal with things as they stand, and anything else just as unexpected that may come about yet again due to the actions of others that I simply cannot be expected to control?"

And with that, Lex sat back in his chair, feeling more than a bit settled, if not outright relaxed. It was actually remarkably... nice... to be able to explain his plans openly to more people than just Kathy and Clark, and not have to be worried in the slightest about getting arrested for what he'd done, or not done as the case may be. ...All things considered, he was definitely looking forward to being able to monologue when he finally went evil, but... did he really want to wait that long before doing something like this again? Hmmm... maybe I should... Yes. Yes, I think I really do need to figure out a way that I can get to do this more often, Lex thought, as he began to try to work his way through the possibilities...

Emily startled him out of it when she, of all things, laughed at him outright. "I can't believe it. --No, actually, I can. You figured out how to blackmail people without actually blackmailing them, and it isn't even illegal or anything," she proclaimed, her tone full of appreciation for just that fact. "Way to go, Kent!"

Lex stared at her for a moment, long enough to realize that she was being serious about it, then grinned widely and happily and made a seated bow towards her. Because that was high praise, especially coming from her.

"I guess it also doesn't hurt that a lot of people owe you favors, since you usually like to trade work for those, instead of money, so they feel 'obligated' to do things for you," Lana said neutrally, which had him glancing over at her. Honestly though, Lex had never really seen what Lana's problem was with that, because it wasn't like they were weird or completely-unreasonable open-ended promises, or anything. They were written down, duly signed-and-sealed and witnessed, and the structures and strictures involved were always well-defined. He even included carefully set limits and bounds, and even deadlines in the form of use-by dates. And on the odd occasion when he traded two promises between people like currency, in lieu of him owing any money to anyone instead, Lex always made sure that all the people involved were okay with the trade and the handoff of favors. It had worked out well enough for everyone involved so far, and he didn't expect to see that changing anytime soon.

And yet, at that offhand comment of Lana's, and Lex's one-shoulder shrug in response, Chloe made a sort of strangled sound.

It was a very odd sort of strangled sound, odd enough that it had Lex turning his head to look up at her.

Chloe was staring down at him, white as a sheet.

"You... trade in favors?"

Lex blinked up at her, puzzled. His parents knew about it and hadn't been opposed to it; in fact, they'd actively encouraged it. ...Was trade-and-barter such anathema to city-dwellers?

"I do more often than not," he told her, thrown enough by her reaction to forget that he wasn't supposed to be talking directly to her until after he had. Talked to her. Well, drat. So much for the high ground.

Lex stifled a wince, and waited for Chloe to call him on it. Except Chloe didn't do that. She didn't do anything. Chloe didn't say anything else. She just stood there, being very quiet, and for some reason, while staring back at her, Lex felt his stomach flip over. ...Maybe it had to do with how bloodshot her eyes looked?

"And now that Lex has finally finished revealing his 'master plan', in all its overcomplexity," Lana said, rolling her eyes at him and ignoring the put-upon look Lex gave her for her undue flippancy at his glorious fiat accompli of not-illegal, not even immoral backlash against the Sullivans. "Can we now get to the real point of all this, Chloe?"

Chloe slowly turned in place and looked at her.

"You need to apologize to him," Lana told her. "Lex generally doesn't do things to people unless he thinks they really deserve it, and in this instance -- for once --" she shot him a quelling look, "I actually agree with him. You shouldn't have gone and dropped Luthor on him like that, especially when none of us -- when even he himself -- didn't know he was adopted," she told her. "And what he did -- or refused to do --" she corrected with another eyeroll at the start of Lex's protest, "was, and I can't believe I'm actually saying this," she sighed, "really pretty mild. For him."

Chloe stared at her.

"You... want me to apologize to him," she said.

"Yes," Lana breathed out, with no small frustration. "I told you to do it last Wednesday, and you laughed me off. I told you to do it, again, on Friday, when you complained to me about the thing with the grocery store." She looked at Chloe with no small consternation and continued with, "I told you what you needed to do again, this weekend, when I noticed that you were having trouble getting anyone at the farmer's market to sell you anything, and I told you again, yesterday, when you couldn't even get the lunchlady to ring up your lunch that afternoon, and I had to buy it for you," Lana told her, and that left Lex blinking in confusion.

Because, yes, Lex knew and had conversed with most of the other farmers in the area over the course of the last week, and also some of the grocers who bought their farm's produce and sometimes asked him for help with stocking solutions and other things. So he could sort of see the problems they'd had with the grocers happening, and maybe some of the people at the farmer's market... but all of them? ...Okay, well, maybe that wasn't too much of a stretch, if word travelled fast and they felt seller's solidarity about it towards them. But... the cafeteria workers at the middle school refusing to sell her lunch? Lex didn't have anything to do with them at all. What had happened there? Were things really going that far?

Initially, Lex had thought it funny to hear Chloe complain about having to buy groceries the next town over, but now that he thought about it... Some of the people he did business in town with were the gas station owners, and not just for gas for the family truck. What if the Sullivan's couldn't buy gas for their car to make the trip? If they couldn't drive themselves outside of town, and no-one in town would sell them food...

No, that was crazy. They wouldn't just starve to death. On a plant manager's salary, surely they had more than enough money to pay someone to deliver groceries to their door from elsewhere, at worst. Besides, they could call a cab from a Granville-based operation and make the trip over and back to Granville that way, along with some gas, if they really needed to, couldn't they? Granville, the next-closest town to Smallville, was only about thirty miles away, and little more than thirty or forty minutes by car. Even a gallon or two would be enough to get them to an out-of-town fill station where they could get more. All they'd have to do was leave town to get it, and, sure, it'd be more than just a little inconvenient for them if they weren't careful about things...

...but that was really the end goal he wanted after all, wasn't it? Get with the program -- and get along with him and everyone else -- or get out of town and go live somewhere else, preferably somewhere far enough away that they could no longer do any more damage to him or -- potentially -- anyone else in town. Right?

"And it's not like he's going to go getting revenge on me for buying you lunch for you at school with your own money," Lana continued, looking over at him.

"Ah, no..." Lex agreed, because that would be pretty unreasonable, all things considered, and not just because Lana had some immunity going for her as having been one of his babysat charges several years prior.

"This is getting completely out of hand," Lana told them both, "and it's not like it isn't easy to fix. Chloe, all you have to do to make everything stop is the same thing that even Lex does when he does stupid things and realizes he's made a mistake," Lana told her, barely glancing over at Lex's scowl, or the way he crossed his arms at her in consternation.

I don't do stupid things, I do smart things, and my mistakes are usually smart ones, too, Lex thought to himself. Though, come to think of it, Lana had said just about the same thing to him earlier, and he hadn't corrected her then. ...So, he probably ought to let it slide this time, too, in the interest of consistency and fairness.

"Just apologize to him for bringing Luthor down to the farm and say you won't do it again -- which shouldn't be all that hard, since you can't exactly drop his adoption on him unawares again," Lana said with a black sort of amusement, "-- and then he'll talk to people and fix the whole not being able to buy food thing. It's not hard," Lana told her.

"Oh, no," Lex protested, because that was only the half of it. "I'm not stopping all of my doing-nothing for just that." That hadn't even really been why he'd started in the first place. "Not until she also promises not to go talking to Luthor about ages, or inheritances, or anything else about me or my family."

Lana turned and huffed out a breath at him, then narrowed her eyes.

"Fine. She apologizes about the mess with Luthor and the adoption, and promises not to pull him back to the farm again, and you tell people that you won't stop doing things for them in the future just for associating with her. She promises not to try to talk Luthor about anything personal about you, and you make sure the word gets around that you don't want anybody getting on her case, and you drop things and forgive her," Lana said, and suddenly Lex didn't like the turn this had taken, what with her doing all the negotiating for Chloe. "And I get a small favor from you for talking her into it," she ended with a smile.

Lex glared at Lana's smile and crossed his arms over his chest. "No deal. I could have negotiated those terms with her myself, without a favor owed you, if you hadn't sabotaged me by making sure her and her father would refuse to talk to me about any of it in the first place!"

"I told them who they could talk to to know what they were in for if they weren't careful, and when they went to my aunt, she gave them the standard warning about you; I heard her," Lana told him. "That's all that's required. It's not our callout that they refused to listen."

Lex frowned, but didn't say anything, because that was the bare minimum. And that Lana had continued on to needle Chloe about it for the whole week -- if true -- was technically above and beyond the call, even. He knew she could have done more, yes, and she knew that he knew that and so forth, but that still didn't exactly leave him with a whole lot of bargaining room on the matter.

"Fine," Lex said, then let out a sigh through his nose. He really didn't want to owe Lana a favor, but... "I'll agree to those terms."

Both Lana and Lex turned back to Chloe, who was staring down at the two of them.

Chloe continued to stare back.

"Go on," Lana said. "It's all worked out." She tilted her head at Chloe, who was staring at her blankly. "It may sound crazy, but Lex does actually do what he says he's going to do, especially for deals like this one."

Chloe stared at her. "You... want me to apologize. To him."

"Yes," Lana told her with a smile.

"To him," Chloe repeated, pointing a slightly-shaking finger at him, then letting her arm fall.

"...Yes," Lana repeated, a little more slowly, as her smile faded slightly. "Just apologize, and he'll stop."

Lex was having a hard time holding his tongue over that gross simplification, when his mind had to jump tracks entirely because Chloe laughed at her. Hysterically. In a doubled-over and largely-uncontrolled fit.

Lana was as startled as he was, which had Lex blinking up at Chloe, refocusing on her and her alone, completely.

And then he blinked again and frowned as he really looked at her, as she slowly calmed back down from her laughing fit, and realized that when he tallied up bloodshot eyes, and pallid-looking skin, and hand tremors, he came up with...

Uh oh. That couldn't be good. Though why she'd be sleep-deprived-- never mind, that wasn't really the important part. ...Maybe he should have been paying a bit more attention to her earlier, rather than explicitly ignoring her? But the first time he'd met her in the barn, she'd displayed dazed confusion when she hadn't been acting all manic instead, so misinterpreting those signs as not being symptoms wasn't really his fault. Neither was disregarding her irritation and general lack of emotional control so far that afternoon as a matter of due course given the vengeance he'd more-or-less been exacting upon her by proxy.

No, the important part was that she was sleep-deprived at all, because...

"Apologize to him," Chloe muttered half to herself. "Apologize to-- no. No. No, I'm not going to do that," Chloe said, with a rather disturbing gleam in her eye as she turned back towards him.

"Why not," Lana demanded, sounding none-too-pleased with Chloe at the moment.

"Because," Chloe said, staring Lex straight in the eye, and he braced himself for whatever she-- "I did him a favor."

...

...

...Lex wasn't sure what expression was on his face just then, but he wondered if it was as empty as his insides felt. If his insides were empty; he wasn't sure entirely sure what he felt, just then. Was he feeling anything, or wasn't he? Then he wondered if this was what normal-people shock felt like. It was, wasn't it?

"You," said Chloe, "are going to be given more money than you'll know what to do with. And now you know who your real parents are. Do you know how many people would kill for that?!" she told him. "To find out that they're the 'vanished' Luthor heir?"

...Well, he wasn't in shock anymore. Now it felt more like a cutting shard of metal had slid into him and then hit something hard, clanging against an inner core of steel that reverberated straight through every damned bone in his body.

"I don't owe him an apology," Chloe said to all and sundry, with all the bloody, angry self-righteousness of an aggrieved party speaking out at last, "The only apology that needs to happen here is the one he owes me."

And she stood there and crossed her arms and smiled at him superiorly as she waited for it.

...And Lex felt like everything had suddenly swirled around that steel core inside slow to a stop and vanish into a frigid stillness of cold clarity, an eye in the storm that just dropped down onto him, as if from high above.

Lex straightened in place slowly, feeling like he was unfurling claws, jagged wings, and he said, "You stupid, ignorant little twit."

Her smile dropped away like a mask.

"Heed my words," he said quietly. Dangerously. "I am Alexander Joseph Kent." He took a breath. "My parents are Martha and Jonathan Kent." He took another breath. "I am not a Luthor. I will never be a Luthor." He breathed in shallowly. "I do not care what other people think about the Luthors. I am myself." He took in a breath, and let it out very slowly, jaw clenched, and glaring at her all the while. "And I DO NOT CARE ABOUT MONEY."

Chloe flinched like he'd slapped her.

"Money," he informed her coldly, "is worthless. It is less than useless. It is paper and ink, or metal trinkets. Neither can be eaten for food or worn for protection, and the paper doesn't burn well enough to generate any lasting warmth." The girl was looking at him like he was insane. He didn't care. "I don't like dealing in money because favors are worth more." Frankly, their closest-equivalent dollar value combined was high enough that no-one in town would have the paper to toss around to cover that sort of thing, let alone him. That was really a side point though, because... "Money is nothing in the face of what happens when every single person you meet refuses to help you at any price, a fact that I believe you should have learned this past week if you had been paying attention at all."

Chloe's eyes were wide enough that Lex could see the whites of her eyes around each iris. He still didn't care.

Lex took in another deep breath, and again forced himself to let it out slowly. "I also don't care what intentions you thought you had, or what you thought the outcome might be for me. If you did actually care about me, as a person, at all, you would have actually talked to me about whatever the hell was running through your tiny little brain, instead of running off, giggling like a lunatic, and not talking to anyone about it -- because I cannot believe that you possibly could have discussed what you were thinking about doing -- and then did -- with anyone else. If you had, you would have known it would have been better by far not to. The fact of the matter is, Chloe, that what you actually did, when you ran off and contacted Luthor like that, to have him descend on us like that, was to put not just me and my family, but the whole damn town in jeopardy!"

Chloe's mouth dropped open, but Lex refused to let her get a word in edgewise.

"Clark and I may not know everything that happened the last time Lionel Luthor was in town, but we do know this," Lex told her. "The factory changed hands. The town was in upheaval for two years afterwards. A lot of people had to move away, and a lot more things changed than just the factory." Lex shook his head once. "Luthor was focused on getting something he wanted done, and as far as any of us know, he got it. In the process, the town was forced to change drastically, and the people who were here at the time suffered for it. Now," Lex told her, glaring at her, "because of you, Luthor is here again, and none of us have any real idea what he wants. Yet."

Lex grimaced. "Regardless of whether the previous change was good or bad for the town the last time, this time I doubt any drastic change will go nearly so well, because, quite frankly, I can't see any drastic change that would make this town any better." He looked her straight in the eye. "And if you think that my influence is enough to have the entire town rise up against you, without even a single word spoken in opposition, you might want to consider the fact that the majority of the people living in this town have long memories, and they all know full well what happened the last time isn't something they want to have happen again. --It isn't just me you're screwing over by doing what you've been doing, Chloe. People aren't 'just acting on my account'; the vast majority of them are likely motivated by nothing more than simple self-interest and self-defense!"

"You didn't say that before," Lana said quietly.

"I didn't think it before," Lex told her in a frank aside, not breaking gaze with Chloe as he did so, while his mind churned away under his new, cold clarity. "To be perfectly honest, I thought most people might give them a pass for being new to town, or might be too distracted by my openly-revealed parentage to really think through things that far, like the far-ranging consequences of her actions. She certainly didn't," he ended, gesturing at Chloe.

He narrowed his eyes at Chloe. "Frankly, from what you just told me, and from what Lana said, that's just about the only explanation that makes sense for this widescale of a reaction. And if you're needing a comparison in terms of what people likely think of you and their level of rage at your actions..." he added. "Think about how you would feel if someone walked around looking for a hornet's nest, found one on a tree off somewhere else, far off in the woods, then broke off the branch it was attached to and carried it all the way back to your house. On purpose. And then, once that was done, threw a rock through one of your windows, shattering it, then shook the nest as hard as they could just before lobbing that through the window, too. And then walked away laughing and thoroughly unapologetic about the mess they'd made, broken glass strewn about and insects everywhere." And, if you confronted them about it afterwards, they simply smiled at you and told you that they'd done it because they'd thought that your house could use a few more hornets in it, and where was their 'thank you' for doing so, by the way?

"Are you threatening me?" Chloe demanded of him, sounding angry with him, and that was just the last straw.

"No, you stupid girl, I'm not threatening you," Lex told her. "I am, and have been, in fact, doing the exact opposite of threatening you. What I have been offering to do," you moron, "is to bail you out of the very, very deep water that you are in, or at the very least throw both you and your father a life preserver, before you both drown and the entire goddamn town eats you alive!"

Chloe looked too shocked for words. ...That was fine, because Lex had plenty more to say.

"It may have escaped your attention in your incredible short-sightedness earlier," Lex informed her, "but Lana was trying to help throw you a line, and I let her. It may also have escaped you earlier that neither of us were even asking you to show any sort of responsibility for your own actions," he told her coldly. "The most anyone is asking you to do is to mouth a few words of apology, and show a level of restraint I've seen consistently in the children I've babysat in town who are half your age," he hissed out at her angrily. Then he shivered in sudden reaction to his own divorced frustration, which had somehow broken through the odd frigid calm surrounding him, and forced himself to remain seated in place as the cold feeling lazily holding around him seemed to for a split-second pulse burning-hot, before turning ice-cold again as he held himself completely still ....and then continue to slowly bleed a little warmer yet again.

After a few level breaths, he slowly released his deathgrip from the armrests on the sides of his chair and resumed where he'd left off, caged in by a colder, flat sort of anger that felt two steps removed from him somehow. "You are a child, and you are new in town, and I am more or less letting you off the hook. I'm not even asking you to do anything to try and fix what you've done. I'm not asking you to do anything at all. All I want, is for you to not expend any more effort on your part to go out of your way to contact Luthor, or otherwise try to draw his attention! Because, frankly, at this point I'd just be thrilled to merely settle for being able to have even the smallest sort of confidence that, even if you aren't going to try to make anything better, that you at least won't be actively trying to make things worse. For anyone."

Chloe stared at him.

"Now," Lex said, "It is clear that you are sleep-deprived and in no right mind to be making any decisions at all right now." Not that you have seemed to be in anything like approaching a 'right mind' at any point that I've interacted with you, now or before. "So go home, get some sleep, and tell your father to contact me tomorrow about working something out between us. Frankly, I'd rather be interacting with a sane and rational adult, capable of advanced logic and foresight, than a short-sighted, hyperactive, and very-flighty childish little you." Who thinks that sticking out their tongue at someone is the height of self-expression.

"I am not a child," Chloe told him stubbornly, digging in her heels. "And I am not going home just because you told me to, to-- to stupid wasps or hornets or anything else!"

She also didn't move from where she was standing, though she did cross her arms at him.

"You are a child, and I am an adult," Lex informed her, in a tone that brooked no argument. "If I give you an order, you will follow it." Especially when it's for your own good. "And I'll... figure something out to begin to fix things in the meantime," he muttered to himself, because lord knew what he was going to have to do to turn this one around. This wasn't going to be easy, and it wasn't going to be able to be done with just him. Trying to force this bandwagon to a grinding halt was going to be a hell of a marching fight.

Lex felt himself get stuck on the mental image, and he forcibly resisted the tug to follow the line of thought on how to start calming down and dealing with the people of town at large, because he knew it was far more important to worry about contacting and dealing with his own acquaintances and partners and such first. The process of pulling himself away from that original thought wasn't easy, though, and it wasn't anything like clean. If anything, it felt a lot more like the mental equivalent of scraping his knees against the ground while finding himself sliding further and further downhill.

Then Chloe said something that smashed a hole in the warming ice around him, and rattled his core.

"What the hell makes you think I'm going to follow any of your orders? Do I look like a member of your insane little child army to you?"

That jarred Lex out of his entire thought process. It left him a little bit dizzy, and the rest of his thoughts in ruins.

"...What?" he said, looking up at her. Because... what?

"Don't play dumb!" she shouted at him. "You've had them messing with me and my dad all week! If it hasn't been snakes in the bathtub or manure smeared across all the outer siding of our house, it's been buckets of paint and-- and-- I-don't-even-know-what falling on our heads walking through doors, and dead guts and things in my locker at school!" she ranted at him. "And that was just Wednesday morning!"

Lex stared at her blankly, and then the meaning of 'call them off' suddenly meant something very, very different to him than it had earlier.

The only problem was... "I don't have a child army," Lex told her.

"Don't play dumb!" Chloe yelled at him again. "Those elementary school kids have been--"

"Wait, elementary school?" Lana cut in, sounding aghast, and it hit Lex about the same time that Pete yelped out:

"--Not again!!"

"Oh, wow," Emily said, with a growing grin. Lana, on the other hand, had skipped right over disbelief and headlong into outrage.

"Alexander, you didn't!"

"...Yes, I didn't," Lex said, then grimaced, and rubbed at his temples. "That's... the problem, exactly." His efforts didn't feel like they were doing much to relieve any of the pressure, unfortunately.

"Wait, she hasn't been staying with you this week?" Pete said with growing horror.

"No," Lex confirmed. "...Though that shouldn't have been a problem," he said out loud to himself, because she was his minon. She followed his orders. That was the whole point of the arrangement. She wasn't supposed to go out acting on her own. So why would she--

"Leaving her without adult supervision for an entire week because you forgot to tell my mom or anyone else about it isn't a problem?!" Pete said. "Are you nuts!?!"

"I didn't forget, I--" Lex glared at him, then shook his head. "She shouldn't have--! That's not--!" Rgh! Lex bowed his head and pressed his fingertips into his temples, hard. "Clark, go find and bring my number 1 here right now," Lex told him, taking full advantage of the fact that he had Clark there and on one of his part-time-minion hours just then.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Clark move off to go do his bidding, and Lex spared an apologetic thought for his little brother, because lord knew how bad it must have been for him this week, not saying or doing anything to anyone -- Lex included -- to try and forestall what he must have noticed was happening around town while Lex was stuck back at home, off away and oblivious on the farm. Either Clark had seen whatever Kathy had been up to and had had to stand back and force himself not to intervene and stop her, which would have been bad enough for him, or she'd been careful enough to do things without out getting caught out even by him, which in some ways would have been even worse for Clark.

"A week," Pete repeated. "She is going to freaking kill someone," Pete said, so worried he started running his hands through his hair, shaking his head in horrified disbelief.

"You are all completely insane," he heard Chloe quietly say next to him. "You..." she trailed off and went very quiet, and very still.

"Lex--" Lana began.

"I need to think," Lex demanded, and those in closest proximity to him fell silent.

He closed his eyes, then forced them open again. Clark wasn't here -- he'd had to send him off to get Pete's sister under firm control immediately -- and he couldn't risk drifting right now. He had things that needed his immediate attention that he needed to deal with right then; he needed to stay present where he was.

He almost felt things moving in the back of his mind, like a phantom sensation. It barely registered; he ignored it.

Okay. Main problem: Kathy. Who was likely off the leash, and probably using a stolen lab coat from somewhere, if she was working within a mindset that had her capable of leading armies around. She was enough trouble on her own, let alone focused on inflicting that trouble on only two people instead of forty-thousand. Lex wasn't sure he wanted to contemplate how far over the line things might have gone, even in that scenario. With her supposedly leading an army of her classmates in her terrorizing of the Sullivans... Though how she could have managed to do that--

Eddies of air around the edges of him, swirling, movement in the wake of spinning wheels trying to turn even faster...

No, actually, Lex knew how. Last year, when she'd entered into the fourth grade and he'd offered to teach her how to secure herself a stable and secure position outside of the normal social spectrum as a matter of course, she'd countered by saying that, actually, what she really wanted to learn was how to be popular. So he'd taught her that instead. He knew that it had worked out for her -- she was a star social butterfly, and had been for some time -- but apparently she must've taken it a lot further than that.

...Not to mention that, if it really was true that 'all her classmates were jealous' about her working for Lex, that a lot of her classmates would likely do her bidding if they thought she was doing something for him, just to be in on things for the 'fun' of it.

Gears crunched. Barely an echo of it reached his conscious mind.

Damnit. He shoved the decimal point for one of his calculations over by one place.

...And a lot of the fourth graders looked up to her, too, from what he heard in bits and pieces of around town.

Lex got a sinking feeling as he frantically shoved a different decimal point over another place again. Oh, this isn't good, he thought, as he reworked some loose calculations, and then reworked them again, and again, and again, up until his brain hit the wall and splattered because there were too many new variables to keep track of them all and this was why he didn't like trying to work large groups of people together into his plans.

"Ow," Lex said quietly, rubbing his forehead. He looked up at his younger friends. "Um."

"How bad," Lana asked him.

Lex took in a deep breath, and tried not to cringe. It must've shown on his face anyway.

"Oh, man," Emily said quietly, almost sympathetically. "I guess she had her heart in the right place?"

Lex looked over at her, and suddenly felt like a deer caught in headlights, as a whole different bundled stringset of facts dove in from the wings and wove themselves outward and into place through the rest of the tangled mess of thought-outcomes, bringing the whole pattern into a far better, almost-dizzying focus.

I have made an incredibly stupid mistake, he thought, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, because while he might have had to admit such to himself -- which was bad enough -- he would never, ever admit it out loud to Lana.

He'd forgotten. Kathy wasn't just his minion, she was a friend of the family. She was his friend, too. Deciding to terrorize the Sullivans hadn't been a minion decision; it had been a Ross decision.

He'd gotten so caught up in not doing things that he'd not told her whether he wanted her to do something or not, either, and she'd made her own decision on that front, too. Just like everyone else.

Lex rubbed his fingers across his eyes, and felt a raging storm of conflicting and highly-contradictory emotions inside, as he contemplated then and there, what his best, most-mitigatory short-term action should be.

He really, really didn't like it.

He lowered his hand and raised his eyes. He didn't look at Chloe; otherwise, he doubted he'd be able to go through with it. He stared off at a point in the distance over Lana's head, instead.

"I'm sorry, Chloe," he said evenly, the effort costing him quite a bit. "Things have gotten a bit... out of hand." He reminded himself to breathe, and did so. "I will..." He struggled with himself for a moment, because this was giving up leverage that he knew would work and worked well, what the hell was he thinking anyway, "...call off... my associate, who shall remain nameless, and whomever else may have been enlisted to the effort," he told her. And he closed his eyes and waited.

"Really," he heard Chloe say.

Don't snap, he told himself, and he breathed in, and out, instead. Clark isn't here to stop you. Don't do it.

"Yes," Lex said, and he waited for the gloating to commence.

There was silence for awhile. ...Well, perhaps that was understandable; the last time Lex had backed down on something in public had been when--

"No," said Chloe.

Lex blinked open his eyes, because he could not possibly have heard her correctly.

"No," Chloe said. "Thanks, but no thanks."

...Okay, now this was just bizarre. Lex slowly turned and looked up at her and said, "...What?"

Chloe had her arms folded, and her hands fisted up against her biceps.

"I said no," Chloe told him. "I don't need or want any favors from you."

Lex stared up at her almost dumbly. "...Chloe," he began slowly, "I don't think you quite understand the situation..."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure I do," Chloe told him with a flat smile, and an odd sort of almost mean gleam in her eye. "I'm pretty sure I know exactly what's going on, and exactly who you are," she told him.

Lex wasn't so sure about that, but he had a growing gut feeling that right now was probably really not the best time to be arguing with her about it. He had no idea how sleep-deprived she was, though he was starting to wonder if she'd hit the point where people usually started to have full-blown hallucinations a couple minutes or so ago.

She really needed to go home and get some sleep -- and be able to get that sleep without having to worry about who-knew-what happening to her for the duration.

"Chloe," he tried again, "It isn't a favor--"

"I don't want anything from you," Chloe told him, "and I'm not going to do anything to help you, either." And with that, she turned away from him as if to leave.

"That doesn't matter," Lex told her, because whether she'd help him or not had no real bearing on whether he'd be calling Kathy (and her army) off of her, even though it probably should. "I'm still going to--"

...

The next thing Lex knew, he felt something wet dripping down his face and he was slowly opening his eyes.

Chloe was holding a coffee cup. It looked like the one from the table that was his, which was probably good because his had been sitting there a long time and had gone cold, while the ones that the Beanery staff carried around on trays at irregular intervals tended to be just this side of scalding hot, and if she'd grabbed one of those instead things would not have gone nearly so well for him, and it was probably good that he was able to keep on focusing on all the tiny little details like that, or he'd probably be--

"Oh, sorry, what were you saying?" Chloe asked him in not-quite-mild tones that had a very particular edge to them, and that was one of--

Lex froze in place. He wasn't flexing his hands on his knees, or gritting his teeth, or letting himself move even the least bit at all, or he'd be--

She must have bent down slightly, because she was staring him directly in the eyes, now, and she said, in the exact same way as-- she said, "Maybe you should repeat that?" And that was two--

She was smiling at him, in a very bad way, and it reminded him of-- that was--

He could see the dead-white and frightened faces of his friends in his peripheral vision.

Clark wasn't here to stop him.

--He wasn't sure why nothing was red, or grey, or hot or cold or anything else that his brain and body wanted to do to him lately for whatever reason he wasn't sure of, but maybe, just maybe, if he was very, very still, and didn't breathe too hard, he could continue to not move and continue to do things that were not-so-terrible like, say, blinking, rather than risk moving and have everything go red and--

"Is everything all right over here, folks?"

Ah. Ahah. Ah-ha-ha. Lex knew that voice. And that voice...

That voice required a response.

"...Everything's fine," Lex breathed out mildly to Sheriff Ethan Miller, continuing to stare straight out in front of him at the same point he had been looking at when he'd first reopened his eyes and not move.

Chloe straightened up and mostly out of his view, and she threw the empty coffee cup at the ground. "No, everything is not fine, officer," she said caustically. "I want you to arrest him!"

There was a pause.

"Miss, I do believe that he was the one on the receiving end of that coffee, not you," Ethan told her. Then he asked of her calmly, "May I ask why you did that?" just as calm his first query had been.

"He was threatening me!"

There was another pause. "Alexander, did you threaten this girl?"

"What?" he heard Chloe say, startled.

"No," he told the Sheriff truthfully, while he concentrated on looking straight ahead at nothing and nobody, and blinking, and his breathing, and not moving--

"Oh my god," he heard Chloe say. "You-- you-- he bought you?" she said, sounding shocked. "He's bought the town police?" Then she laughed once. "--Oh, of course he has," she said almost breathlessly.

There was a longer pause.

“Ma’am, that is a very serious accusation you are leveling there,” Lex heard Sheriff Ethan tell her in a low, somewhat under-his-breath drawl -- and of course he would be offended by the suggestion, as an officer of the law he was as righteous and upstanding as they come. But he was also a good person, and would let something as insane-sounding like that go; she was just a kid. Ethan would cut her a break.

And he did. Lex heard Ethan take in a slow breath and tell her in calm tones, “Now, you seem a mite upset--”

“Upset?!?”

“--And if you have something you’d like to report,” Ethan continued in that low, soothing voice, “then perhaps we ought to go down to the station and--”

“NO!” she shrieked, and Lex half-saw, half-heard a slapping sort of noise, skin against cloth, and heard Ethan grunt from the impact of the flat of her fist against his chest.

“Ma’am,” he heard the town sheriff grind out through a clenched jaw, “that is battery--”

“No, let go! Let go of me, you jerk!!”

--scuffle of motion--

“--assault and battery of a police officer and--”

“LET GO OF ME! NO!!!”

“--disturbing the peace, and you are coming down to the station with me right now, little missy,” he heard Ethan continue as he rattled off charges and hauled her away, kicking and screaming, her voice high-pitched and staccato-fast and frightened as she struggled.

Lex sat there, and breathed carefully, oh-so-carefully, and tried not to move. He tried not to even think, and that was even more difficult.

Nobody he could see moved either. it seemed rather quiet.

...Or maybe it was just him. Hearing seemed to swim in and out of focus as he sat there when heard, finally, someone he knew say, “Clark, man, there’s something really wrong with--”

Clark was directly in his field of vision, crouching directly in front of him and looking concerned.

“--never seen him like this,” he heard, and there were sounds like low chatter, and the banging of cups into table surfaces, clanging of silverware, but it all seemed to be underwater, fading in and out.

“--grey-out,” he heard/saw Clark say, tell someone off to the left side of him, before turning back to him and reaching up to touch his cheek.

“What? When did--”

“--after Chloe laughed,” he heard Clark say as they looked into each other's eyes. “Lex, can you hear me?”

“--can’t be drifting, he was talking--”

“K-k-k-kk--” Lex tried to talk, he tried to move, but now that Clark was here and it should be safe to, he couldn’t. It felt like every joint in his body was locked in place. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t move his jaw. He could barely blink.

“You’re okay,” Clark told him, lifting both hands to place them on either side of his neck. “Everything’s okay.” Lex felt the tendons in his neck spasm, start to relax oh-so-slightly, and tried to talk again, barely got out a breathy groan. Clark’s eyes got a bit sharper -- he’d noticed that. “I’ve got Kathy here,” he said. “I got her for you,” and the youngest Ross sibling dropped down at Clark’s side, looking stone-faced and stubborn... and she had just a touch of worry in her eyes.

Lex tried to move again, strained, and finally realized that it wasn’t just his joints, it was like every muscle in his body that he could feel was tensed-up hard. He tried, and tried again to loosen them, in little small spasms, and managed to pitch forward stiffly into Clark’s chest, bent at the waist, his younger brother catching him, and once he did, it was like that single act was the keystone that had been holding back a cascading effect -- he flopped loosely against Clark where he was held, collapsed completely.

He gargled out a general complaint against his lack of function as his eyes rolled around loosely in their sockets, his breathing increased to quick, shallow pants as his body tried to make up for the lack of oxygen and he realized how little air he’d been getting in -- letting himself get in -- before.

“Got you,” Clark told him, cradling him up against his chest, “I got you.” He slowly shifted Lex into an upright seated position, so he was facing both him and Kathy.

Kathy frowned at him, but Clark had their priorities straight. Lex flailed out limply with an arm, then managed a little more control on the second try and grabbed at Clark’s shirt, tried to pull himself more upright and towards her. Kathy’s eyes widened a little as Clark helped him pitch forward.

“Both here. Good.” Lex’s tongue felt wide and heavy in his mouth, his voice full of gravel, but he needed to get this out now before all else. It was important. “Lis-ten. Clark.” He leaned up against him and tilted his head back. Clark helped. “Clark,” he had to stop and swallow. “Clark, you are hereby promoted to part-time henchman,” he told his little brother, and there was silence for a moment as Kathy’s eyes went wide with surprise and Clark’s eyes shone and went quick-and-conniving-and-little-brother-sharp as what Lex had actually said really registered.

And then Kathy yelped out “What?” and Clark pulled Lex back against him into a stronger, safer, more-secure hold. Then his part-time henchman turned to Lex’s lesser-ranked minion and started barking out orders, fast and furious, and while Lex sat there barely able to listen, head reeling and half out-of-it, he still knew it had been the right decision. He knew that the promotion would cause some internal strife later, but it had been necessary, oh so necessary. Kathy needed to be stopped and contained post-haste, and Lex couldn’t do that right now -- but Clark could. Clark would know what to do to get her and her ’army’ under control, and he was. Lex couldn’t hear him, but he could feel the buzz and rumble of words coming from Clark’s chest up against his cheek, and Clark would do the right thing. He would. He always did.

Kathy, glaring and mad -- but with those emotions tamped down -- huffed at Clark after the end of the string of orders, but she didn’t talk back. What she did do was-- she got up and rushed off, out of Lex’s field of view, and Clark sighed and looked down at Lex again.

Lex’s eyes fluttered closed and he passed out.

~*~*~*~*~*~