Work Text:
Being Kryptonian had its perks. Unfortunately, it did not imbue Clark with the powers of a mechanic above and beyond what his father had taught him; and when Jonathan crawled out from under the hood coated to his elbows and ruddy cheekbones in oil, Clark knew it was beyond either of their ken to fix.
“Sorry, son…you’ll have to find a ride home from school.”
Which Clark didn’t mind at all; it just happened to slip his memory that Lana and Chloe were road-tripping into Metropolis to visit Nell for the weekend, which would leave Clark stranded with his deadline at the Torch long after any decent people had gone—besides, of course, the jocks, and Clark wasn’t keen on asking one of them for a ride. He could run, he supposed…but with Lionel Luthor’s people prowling Smallville Clark was doing his best to dial down on his powers.
That was where Lex came in; they bumped into each other, quite literally, as Clark was on his way to first period. Papers went flying, Clark was reduced to profuse apologizing and the two men got down on their hands and knees to rescue official-looking documents from under the feet of harried students.
“Sorry, Lex…I wasn’t paying attention. What are these?”
“My company is making a charitable donation to the school, and Principle Reynolds wanted to make sure all the I’s and T’s were taken care of.” Lex chuckled slightly as Clark sprawled across the hallway to snatch a wispy escaping paper. “Clark, it’s not a problem,” Lex assured him as he relieved Clark of an armload of papers. “What’s got you so worked up? You’re rarely this agitated first thing in the morning.”
Clark hitched his backpack up his shoulder. “My dad’s truck went haywire this morning. I have to stay late to help at the Torch, but I forgot Chloe can’t give me a lift.”
“Out of shape, buddy?” Lex teased, falling into step with him toward his classroom. “A little walk home from school never hurt anyone.”
“Except I was supposed to lay down pipes for my parents. I mean,” Clark amended at Lex’s raised brow. “I was supposed to help them lay pipes.”
“Well, don’t sweat it. Just so happens I have a few errands to run around town that should keep me away from the mansion for most of the day. I’m sure your folks won’t mind if I give you a lift home.”
Clark felt himself brighten with relief. “You sure? I don’t want to impose.”
Lex swatted him glibly on the shoulder with the papers. “You’re not as much of a drag as you think you are, Clark. Just be outside the gate as soon as your self-proclaimed journalistic exile is over, and I’ll be there.”
And that was the plan, which was well and good with Clark; except that his exile, as Lex called it, went long overdue. Chloe had left a stack of the school’s schedule printouts on her desk with a note asking Clark to please, please let her cash in an IOU and hang these around the school.
Clark didn’t mind the quiet of the school hallways, entombed in white-yellow strata from the overhead lights. It was slow but steady going, with teachers still around and his superspeed not an option. Clark went along as fast as any human would with backpack on one arm and papers on the other, taping the next day’s schedules to the walls, smoothing them down with the side of his fist. He’d made it to the locker room when the doors opened and the football team spilled out.
They were Clark’s age, all of them, Clark’s grade; boys he’d tried out for the football team with, a couple of whom the old, fiery-tempered coach had picked Clark over before Clark had politely bowed out. They sized him up now with intense dislike that Clark was wholly used to.
“Hey, Kent. Still working for the school tabloid, huh? Probably a good idea…stick to something you’re decent at.” The quarterback, Hank Connor, was a fit five-foot-nine, had to look up at Clark when he said it, and still somehow managed to make the jab stick.
“Here, need someone to carry those papers for you?” One of his flunky simpered, reaching for the stack tucked against Clark’s elbow.
Clark rolled his eyes. “Don’t you have something better to do with your time?”
“Oh, like…like, what? Shooting straight for Met-U scholarships?” Connor strolled backwards down the hallway, eyes on Clark as his linebackers took up Clark’s flanks. “You could’ve had that all, too, Kent, right? Last year?”
“Football’s not really my thing.” Irritated, Clark slapped the last schedule onto the wall next to the principle’s door and swung his backpack over both shoulders instead of just one, heading for the double-doors leading outside.
“But it was your dad’s thing, right?”
Clark stopped, thumbs hooking through the nylon straps, looking back. Connor was clearly gloating, his smile broad and oily beneath his straight black hair.
“Doesn’t it bother you, Kent? Not being able to live up to your old man’s legacy? He marched that team straight down the field in his glory days and you couldn’t even make it to one game.”
“Just leave me alone,” Clark growled.
“Hey! Guess you can only expect second-best from an adopted son!”
The door fell shut on the comment but it slipped through anyway, piercing past an overstuffed backpack and twisting dagger-blade deep into the small of Clark’s back. He stood rooted to the spot, the back of his neck flushing.
It’s never mattered before—it doesn’t matter I’m adopted. I know that.
Except there was a spaceship in his family’s storm cellar and a last creed set forward by his birth father, scripted inside that alloy husk, and what if, what if he wasn’t meant to play football or write news stories but to conquer. To rule, iron-fisted and angry as he was right now with the dusky Kansas wind whipping his dark hair across his brow—so angry his head pulsed with it. What if he was meant to take puffed-up jocks and throttle them, crisp them, crush them under his heel?
Clark loped blindly into the late afternoon, coming up on Lex’s Porsche parked outside the gate. Some song by The Calling crested on the speakers and Lex leaned against the car’s sleek silver flank, all powder-blue shirt under a dark coat and hands in his pockets, head leaned back, the picture of calm.
When he caught sight of Clark, Lex shrugged his elbows out away from his body. “What happened? I thought you’d be out here fifteen minutes ago—Clark?”
Clark winced as the school doors banged open again, the jocks leapfrogging down the steps behind him. They’d already forgotten him—out of sight, out of mind.
Lex boosted away from the Porsche to meet him. “Who are those guys? Were they talking to you? Clark—hey!” Lex stepped into his path, laid a hand on Clark’s collarbone to stop him. “Look at me. Hey. What happened?”
It was rare for Lex’s voice to sound so gentle, and somehow that made the whole situation worse. Clark was Kryptonian—tougher than steel was supposed to mean tough as nails, tough as Teflon. Water off a duck’s back.
“It’s nothing. Can we just go?”
“Not until you tell me what those jocks said to you that’s got you looking like you were disowned.” At Clark’s quick, candid look, Lex let his hand drop. “I used to see that face in the mirror every single day at Excelsior. Not usually on someone with hair.” His eyes darted up to Clark’s dark curls with a wry smile. “Now. You want to level with me, Clark? What did they say?”
“High-school stuff. You know. How I’ll never live up to my father’s image, how I’m second-best because I’m adopted…I’m sure a lot of people in my position have heard worse.” Not, Clark reasoned, that any of those other children were aliens orphaned by a potentially bloodthirsty and ruthless race. But the principle stood.
Lex looked very stiff, standing there with his hands thrust into his pockets, watching as the jocks lit up in the cab of their truck. Finally he popped his own door. “Get in.”
Clark hesitated; the last time Lex had held that rebellious tone with that same command, Clark had ended up on an impromptu, albeit not unwelcomed voyage to Metropolis to catch a football game on a Saturday night. He slid dutifully in shotgun. “Lex, what are you planning?”
As the truck grumbled and roared toward the gate, Lex gunned the Porsche, cutting backwards in a smooth, straight line that forced Connor to slam on his brakes, hard. Clark could hear him swearing as he hopped out, and Lex followed suit.
“The hell’s your problem—?” Connor froze. “Luthor.”
Lex shrank the distance between them, backing the boy against the door and slamming both hands flat against the rusted metal on either side of his head. Connor’s linebackers seemed off their game, too unnerved to move, and Clark was tense himself. With one arm stretched across the seatback, facing Lex’s open front door, he was ready to slide out and intervene at the first sign of Lex being in danger.
But Lex was, himself, fully in his element. “If I ever hear a word about you using bullying and scare tactics on another student in this school, I will make it my personal business to assure that you never set foot on the grounds at Metropolis University or play another game of football in any organized setting for the rest of your life. Do I make myself clear?”
Connor was still for a moment, weighing his chances before he finally, grudgingly, nodded.
Lex pulled back, then thrust his head forward aggressively. “And stay away from Clark Kent.”
Clark scooted back into his seat as Lex took the wheel, and they pulled out smoothly, leaving a frozen quarterback and his friends behind. Clark settled his backpack in his lap and crossed his arms on top of it, staring out the window.
He wasn’t sure he approved of Lex’s methods, but he couldn’t deny there was a part of him that liked having a bodyguard for a change. It was only when he looked at his life from a step back that it occurred to Clark how many of the bullets didn’t bounce off of him; they stayed under the surface and festered and created open wounds he just never bothered to pay attention to.
Sometimes, though…sometimes other people saw them.
Presently, Lex cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about the rhetoric from a couple high-school football players, Clark. They don’t know you from Adam…more importantly, they buy into a societal standard that tells them they have to put themselves a head above everyone else if they’re going to achieve their dreams. It’s not a reflection on you.”
“I know that. That’s not what bothers me.” Troubled, Clark glanced at Lex; dusk was coming early, and the piping at the farm was out of the question, left for another day. The dashboard lights threw an alien green cast over Lex’s features. “They weren’t really wrong, that’s the problem. I did quit the team after just one game. I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps at all.”
“That’s never seemed to bother you before,” Lex said mildly. “Clark, even if you can’t match Jonathan’s record of field passes from high-school, something tells me you’re achieving something that’s much more important to him.” He caught Clark’s curious eye, and shrugged. “In avoiding the conflict, you did more than save yourself from potentially painful repercussions…you did exactly what your parents taught you. You turned the other cheek, you let the goodness inside of you deflect their hate. You’ve done absolutely nothing to let Jonathan and Martha Kent down.”
Lex’s admonishment warmed Clark through. “Yeah…maybe you’re right.”
“You may be adopted, Clark, but you have more of your parents in you than I have of mine.” Lex tapped the fingers of his leather driving gloves restlessly on the wheel. “Or so I’d like to believe.”
“You stood up for me, Lex,” Clark pointed out. “Outside of Pete and Chloe and Lana, and my parents, there’s not a lot of people I can trust to have my back the way you do. And I’m thankful. Really, I am. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
They cruised toward the farm at a pace that betrayed leisure against Lex’s usual pedal-the-floor rush, simply enjoying one another’s quiet company with the radio turned down to white noise, and Clark had the feeling neither of them was particularly eager to make it back to the farm.
In fact, Clark mused fondly, football legacies and school newspapers aside, there were few places he felt more at ease these days than riding shotgun with Lex behind the wheel, gobbling the miles toward home.