Simile
"Clark, the idea that everyone is the same, that we're all equal, that's a Platonic ideal, like Good or Beauty. There is no Equal in the world." Lex's voice flows and dips with a very singular melody, the tone soft, but always somehow heard even in a busy room.
Clark doesn't see Lex as much as he used to, not with his mom's pregnancy and Lex's girlfriend. Lex is like his entire life: at once comforting in its consistency and frightening in its uniqueness. Lex is always full of speeches about difference and the accepting of it; that hasn't changed since Clark met him. Clark doubts that a lifetime's training can be overcome with fresh air and organic pie. That's a fairly new idea, doubt in a person's ability to change, one he would have shunned scant months ago. Clark used to believe that everyone was born good, that goodness was the default position for everyone.
But Clark's done some serious thinking about genetics, about nature and nurture. His opinions are hardening, solidifying into an adult pattern of belief that isn't as easily altered as his open, childish worldview was. Clark doubts that good or bad really mean anything besides what the speaker imbues in them.
"Fair and equal aren't the same, Lex. I said it wasn't fair for you to give benefits to some part-time employees and not to others." Clark sighs as he speaks, and Lex just keeps typing.
Clark isn't very interested in the argument. Lex used to change his mind more often when Clark dissented from Lex's ideas.
Lex used to seek Clark out, debate some inner conflict he was toying with and voice all of the lines he heard Lionel speaking in his head. Clark would play the role of exterior Lex, and they would spend hours in heated debate. Clark doesn't put up much a fight when Lex talks like The Prince anymore.
"The concept of fairness rests on the shoulders of the notion of equality. For something to be fair or not fair, there must be a judgment based on two equitable positions or factors." Lex doesn't elaborate. A year ago he would have held forth on a ten-point lecture of how equality is a false construct of a meritocracy that really never was one, but when he went into the office he would have given everyone in the plant the same benefits package because that's what Clark lobbied for. Clark doesn't pay much attention to LexCorp these days.
Clark is like Lex: born for a certain purpose, the final end of his parent's plotting and life's work, intended to be so far above equality that the word loses any meaning at all.
Lex is the spark for Clark's musings about his heritage. He has watched Lex struggle against his own background, fight his father and his father's rhetoric. Clark has memories of Lex being honest and upright and generous and everything not-Luthor. There have also been lies and guarded words, barbs and power-struggles between them. Lex is only the sum of his parts, and no matter what the underlying intentions, he will only ever be who he is.
Clark used to be like Lex's best intentions. Now he is more like Lex's darkest impulses. Clark isn't stupid, and he's coming to realize that concepts like intelligence and cleverness might not apply to him at all. After all, those are human estimations are meant to measure one human to another. Clark isn't human. He still measures himself against Lex, though.
Lex does paperwork in the Talon every Thursday and Sunday evening. He told Clark when he began this regime "You have to appear accessible, Clark." Some Thursdays Clark is too busy to drop by to see His Majesty shuffling papers and typing up reports to board members. Sundays, he's usually sipping a coffee and dodging Lana's latest cold- shoulder while Lex pontificates. Lex is like Jonathan Kent on occasion.
This week, Lana wears a lavender sweater set and glares at Clark because he told her he would meet her for brunch yesterday. The McMillan's barn caught fire, and he missed the date. Last week she wore pink, they were going to the movie, and Mike Stephenson fell down his well.
"Why don't you just go out with Chloe?" Clark looks up to meet Lex's eyes. Lex is like Clark's mom now.
"Don't start." Lex doesn't protest when Clark snaps at him, his expression doesn't even alter anymore.
"Clark, are you gay? Because I can't really figure out another reason why you keep the two best looking girls in your school tagging behind you and fighting each other for your attention. Fuck both of them..." Lex's annoyance over Clark's relationships with Chloe and Lana has been stated and restated, and Clark has heard it enough times.
"I already have." Clark doesn't break eye contact. Lex folds his hands in his lap and tilts his head.
"Would you like to elaborate? Are you being metaphorical? Because if you are, you are dead on the money." Lex quirks his mouth, and even if they aren't who they used to be, either of them, or what they could have been to each other, they are very much friends.
"I was being literal." Clark flicks his eyes away from Lex and focuses on Chloe's bright face grinning, showing white, white teeth while she regales Lana about her latest story. Clark can hear every word; he can hear Lex's breathing exercise, too. Lex clicks his laptop closed, and then breathes deeply five times. Lex is like a very complex machine that only repeats itself on intervals that you must pay close attention to discover. Clark knows the clockwork Lex.
"Hm. I suppose I've misjudged you again..." Lex pauses when Clark stands up.
"Come on, I'll tell you all about it." He doesn't have to look over his shoulder to see if Lex will follow. They have their own patterns, and Lex never misses a chance to learn a secret. Lex is like the proverbial, curious cat, and Clark is fairly sure he will meet the same end.
Lana keeps an office where the projection booth used to be. The colors are slightly less garish, muted purple and mauve and ivory. Clark has come to detest the girlishness of the Talon, all the aspects of it. To be honest, Clark just generally prickles at predictability and similarity. His own included. Lex, even as known as he is, gives Clark the kind of sudden unpredictability that he craves. Lex follows him and crosses to sit on the edge of Lana's desk as Clark closes the door behind them. A stained-glass window with the Egyptian eye of Isis now covers the hole the projector used to sit behind, the glass around the black eye the same red and purple of the main portion of the interior.
"You don't have to tell me things like this, Clark. If you haven't before, I don't know why you would now." If he was anyone else, that would be a passive/aggressive ploy, but Clark knows that this is Lex's brand of honesty. He only wants what is freely given, until the time comes to take by force. Lex doesn't like the middle ground of simple coercion.
"I want to show you." The `I' comes from three feet away, and the `you' is spoken in Lex's ear.
Clark has learned many things in the last few months. One of them is that shock is an excellent tool for restraining someone. Lex, like Lana like Chloe, is too stunned to attempt to escape, and a couple of seconds is all Clark ever needs to convince someone that escape is a very silly plan.
"Are you jealous, Lex? Don't be. They were just practice." He shoves just enough, and Lex topples backwards onto the pristine desktop. Clark carefully pops open the buttons of Lex's shirt making sure not to rip them off. That was a mistake he made with Lana. He ripped the fly of her jeans, and she wondered over that for days.
"Clark, what the hell is..." But Lex doesn't struggle, not really, he squirms a bit and gasps, but he doesn't shove or bring his knee up.
"Don't you want to ask me something, Lex?" He picks up Lex's left hand where it lays gripping and ungripping air, places it on the back of his neck just at the hair line. The fingers instinctively slide up and tangle in Clark's too-long hair.
Clark's tongue darts out, traces the ridge of the scar he sometimes dreams about moving over harsh words, flexing through moans. Lex's entire body clenches forward in reaction, left hand tightening in Clark's hair, right arm clutching at his back, legs wrapping around Clark's thighs where he stands leaning over him. Clark wants to smile, but Lex bites his bottom lip and sucks it into his mouth, and that's good enough, better than a smile really.
Clark breaks away to move his mouth to Lex's neck. He clamps on and sucks against Lex's pulse until Lex yanks hair and moans with a pained hitch. "That will be gone in an hour, won't it?" Clark licks the purpling skin, nips with his teeth, and Lex bucks off the desk more.
"Yes, Clark, you know about..." Lex's voice trails off and Clark steals his air, and denying Lex the chance to admit his odd healing abilities, give him a second's cathartic spark, isn't fair. Fair is based on the idea of equality, and Clark knows that owning everyone else's secrets and sharing none of his own is hardly fair. Kal-El is no one's equal, either. He knows that now.
"Lex, I'm an alien. I can read those pictograms. I speak that language." His tongue skims over Lex's fluttering eyelids, and his hand pops the button of Lex's thousand dollar slacks. "You won't remember this later, but I do love you, even if it doesn't matter."
Lex struggles then, enough that if Clark weren't reaching for his cock, and he is imperious, there might be serious injuries incurred. Clark knows more than Lex wants him to, though. That Lex is just a man is one of those facts. Just a man who dissolves in the face of the very truth he's been after for years because there's a hand on his cock and a tongue in his mouth and a warm, hard body pressing into him.
Clark isn't even hard. He's studying the man beneath him: the cording of his neck, the flush to his cheeks, the way one of his fingers keep twirling a piece of Clark's hair, the exact pitch of his moaning.
"I wish things were different, Lex, I wish...a lot of things." Grey/blue eyes fly open, and he gets a hand wedged under Clark's chest to shove him back. Clark smiles, because this isn't what he expected to happen. Lex is like your car keys: intimately known to you, but always slipping away from you at the time you expect to put you hand around them.
Clark lets Lex push him away, watches as Lex slides to his feet in a fury. "Clark, what the fuck do you think you're doing?"
The genuine smile, the one he used to wear every day, that used to spring up constantly, emerges on Clark's face. Now, only his mom and Lex ever see this expression.
"You know, last time you gave in. You told me you loved me." Lex's fingers become still in the middle of buttoning his shirt.
"There was no last time, Clark." The hickey on his neck is fading already, and Clark knew that would happen, but it makes his surreal life all the less real every time.
"There was a last time, and a time before that. But you won't remember, don't be embarrassed." Clark steps forward and straightens Lex's clothes before Lex can get in a punch. If Clark were anyone else, Lex's right hook would lay him out.
Lex glares, his mouth a tight line, his hands in his pockets. Clark smiles again. He gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of Lex's anger. That he chalks up to another strange, alien turn-on.
He keeps his eyes open, just in case Lex bolts, but in his mind, he imagines looking out of Lex's eyes. Imagines seeing himself from Lex's height, pictures a golden thread linking Lex's bellybutton to his, the thread anchored around both of their spines.
With a sudden whoosh, Clark walks into Lex's memories, all the recent ones the easiest to snatch, to slide along the golden thread and steal back for only himself. Clark takes everything from the time he told Lex about sleeping with Lana and Chloe.
Clark blinks and the connection dissolves. Lex tilts his head to the side and rubs his left hand across his scalp.
"Uh, Clark, not to sound insane, but how did we get up here?" Lex knows how to modulate his voice, instead of worried, he sounds amused.
"We came up here to make out, don't you remember, Lex?" Clark laughs, and Lex follows. "I guess you hit your head pretty hard the other day, didn't you?"
Lex is always getting hit in the head, and Clark started being thankful for that when this newest ability manifested. A head trauma will explain even the oddest occurrence.
"I guess so. I might have to go to the clinic when I go back to Metropolis." Lex snatches the ledger out of Lana's top desk drawer; Clark knows he figures that's why they came up here.
"I think it's probably just stress, Lex, all things being equal." Clark flicks the light off as he leaves the room.