Chapter Text
The second Lex leaves the prison where he has spent the past years of his life, he resolves to completely forget the entire experience and start anew. There is no point in dwelling on the past, especially the parts of it that offer nothing of value. And he’s sure none of the memories he made, if you really want to call them that, are going to be of any use to him at all. So he marches forward, slides into the passenger compartment of the limousine as his driver keeps the door open for him, activates the privacy partition, and thinks of nothing. He’s wearing the same clothes he was wearing on the day he was arrested, as he attended all of his court sessions in an orange jumpsuit. The clothes are itchy, and they smell of his own rancid sweat.
His mood doesn’t lighten in the slightest when the car stops in front of his Metropolis abode and he’s allowed to walk inside of his home in peace, any reporters having been dealt with rather aggressively, he presumes, by his staff. It doesn’t improve when he takes the itchy suit off, or when he steps into the shower and stays there for almost a full hour, letting his skin experience the full range of sensations that boiling water can produce: from shivering due to confusing the sensation with being cold, to feeling like he’s about to pass out because of the steam. Afterwards, to try and distract himself from his own nothingness, he turns on the TV, just to see the caped menace who’s still running around Metropolis be the front and center of the segment he’s watching. The only relief comes when he lies on the pillow, not sleeping on his back the dignified way he’s taught himself to since he was in middle school, but curling up in a fetal position, holding another pillow in his arms, finally allowed to stop being a witness to his own consciousness.
The next day, he does what he’s dreamt of doing since his first day of imprisonment: he goes back to work. Not that his brain got much relief during the first and the last period of his stay in prison, with the way he forced himself to consume as much information as possible, as well as making his associates involve him in all the decisions he could realistically be involved with. But still, in between those moments, there was an endless blank space he should try harder to forget about.
There’s no avoiding the paparazzi, this time, but Lex is ready. He keeps his head high, a smile on his face like he’s back from a tropical vacation and he doesn’t know why everyone is making such a big fuss. He lets the cameras photograph him at all angles, giving them different expressions so that people can project whatever feelings they want him to have: sincere regret, smug satisfaction, cold displeasement. He even gives a bewildered look to one of the cameras, so that people can read him as traumatized, if that’s the story they prefer.
Frustratingly, the main entrance is exactly as he remembers it. He would know if it had changed, of course, any architectural modifications having to be approved by him before they could happen, but it feels wrong regardless. Like something should fundamentally be different, and yet it isn’t. There is a veritable army of workers who are there to greet him - none of the top executives, who are waiting in a meeting room on the upper floors, but a great deal of faces Lex vaguely remembers. If his hands are shaking while the mob of people stares him down, he doesn’t let them see it, placing a hand on the shoulders of one of the men he actually recognizes and using the contact to keep himself steady.
Once he’s in the elevator, he tells himself that the hard part - facing the mob - is already over. He doesn’t allow himself to lean against the wall of the cabin, keeping his posture straight, but not rigid. He walks into the meeting room, where he’s showered by the fakest round of applause he has ever heard in his life. The board makes demands of him. He makes sure they know they can’t make demands of him, and in the meantime he thinks about which of their demands he should address as soon as possible.
A common complaint concerns his reputation, which reflects negatively on the way the company is perceived. It seems like donating sizable amounts of money to all kinds of charities while he was in prison, choosing the most sympathetic causes ranging from curing blind kittens to feeding starving children, hasn’t quite managed to make the public opinion forget about his “heinous” crimes, and a grander plan is in order. It’s going to be easier to accomplish a complete change of the way he’s perceived while he’s actually in the public eye, anyway.
It’s only hours later that he’s allowed to enter his office. Back at Belle Reve, he would have already been fed his first round of institutional slop, besides the coffee they usually gave prisoners for breakfast. He tries to dismiss those thoughts. He should think about the present, and the future, and not of the past. His secretary, Heather, smiles at him with an expression he could almost think of as genuine.
His office is soundproof, which really helps when he’s having private meetings with possible business partners. The silence is a little uncomfortable, but he'll get used to it. Really, it’s no problem at all that the windows don’t open and he’s sealed in here with no way out. There’s a long stack of documents and a lot of memos on his desk, which are presumably going to help him get reacquainted with the way his company functions. So what if he hasn’t touched them yet? The day is still young and he has plenty of time to do everything he has to do.
He genuinely doesn’t expect it, when he hears the shattering of glass and his space is intruded upon. The last time the Kryptonian decided to invade his office, he took the long route, entering on the other side of the building and storming through the entire floor. This time he doesn’t even bother with that and he breaks one of the glass panels that separates his office from the outside.
There are many things Lex should be thinking right now, he’s sure about it. His old self would be trying to deal with the Kryptonian threat, getting ready to deploy weapons that can kill the alien for once and for all, while also thinking of legal strategies to defend himself based on self-defense principles. A more diplomatic approach would be to greet the alien and ask him what exactly is the reason for his visit, and proclaim his innocence. If he has committed any crimes that warrant this kind of treatment, besides the ones from several years ago, he’s not aware of it. He can surely convince Superman this is all a misunderstanding.
He should be thinking about these things, of course, but he isn’t. He’s just contemplating the glass panel the alien broke. Repairing it is going to be extremely expensive, but that doesn’t worry him in the slightest. If a lesser man were paying for the job it could require months of time, but he can get people to do it in a few weeks, even if he has to fly them in from the other side of the world. He stares at the spiky hole in the window. They’re more than a thousand feet above ground. What would it be like, he wonders, to throw himself off of the building? Not that it would be very productive to do that right now - the caped nuisance would just catch him and send him to a psychiatric institution.
Yes, the caped nuisance. He supposes he hasn’t acknowledged Superman in the slightest, and the creature is just staring at Lex with a bemused expression.
“That could have been dangerous,” he says, going for amiable indifference and missing it by about a hundred miles.
“I’m invulnerable,” boasts the loathsome alien, who is currently floating a few inches above the ground, his arms crossed like he’s about to deliver one of his irritating lectures.
“Not for you, Superman. There could have been bystanders below. Has it escaped your attention that there are hundreds of reporters and nosy people who came for my triumphant return to the world of business?”
“I checked-”
“Sure, sure, you checked. But you knocked some very large shards of reinforced glass down below, and, due to the air resistance, they could have taken a while to fall,” says Luthor. There’s a part of him that’s itching to take one of the pieces of paper on his desk and map out the simple physics equations that would explain this. He resists the impulse, but then he just grabs one of the documents and a mechanical pencil and starts pretending to read it. The alien will just leave if he ignores it, right? He wonders what happened to Heather, and whether she’s going to show up with a cleanup crew in a few minutes. It would surely be a nice distraction.
“Luthor,” says the other man, his voice sounding kind of unsure. “Are you ignoring me?”
Lex sighs and turns his eyes away from the paper, to stare at the alien menace that’s trying its hardest to piss him off. “I’m a very busy man, Superman. People who come into my office usually have an appointment. Take, for example…” he reads his schedule for the day, grimacing when he recognizes the commitment he willfully made a few months ago and apparently forgot about. “Clark Kent. He’s that journalist you seem fond of, and I’m going to give him my first interview out of prison.”
“You’re not,” says Superman.
“Huh?”
“Clark Kent is not giving you an interview,” explains Superman. “He’s meeting you in an informal capacity, on behalf of the Daily Planet.”
“Right. You’re chummy enough with one of the two only journalists you allow to interview you that you know his full schedule, but the press is not at all biased in your favor. But my point stands. He has an appointment.”
“Are you going to hurt him?” says Superman. Lex has no idea what he’s talking about. There’s an uncomfortable fog in his brain that’s clouding all his thoughts.
“Hurt whom?” asks Lex
“Clark Kent,” answers Superman.
“I wasn’t going to, Superman,” he says. He really has no plans of hurting Kent, although admittedly he didn’t even know he had a meeting scheduled in the early afternoon until he happened to read the document Heather had left for him. He’s sure he could come up with some last-minute plan to do physical damage to the journalist if he really wanted to, although he doesn’t see the point. He’s supposed to be rehabilitating his reputation, not damaging it more. “Now, do you plan on harassing me further, or can you just leave the same way you came?”
The alien doesn’t say anything for a while, hovering in mid-air in the middle of the office. Lex ignores him.
“I’m watching you, Luthor,” declares Superman finally. Then, he disappears from Lex’s sight. It’s only a few minutes later that Heather comes into the office, followed by three members of security and five janitors bearing brooms and trashcans.
The second visitor he gets that day is, as Superman promised, Daily Planet journalist Clark Kent. Lex knows everything about the man, has been intrigued by him ever since the first article he penned about Superman, and his interest only grew the more pieces the man wrote about the caped alien. The explanation he’s found for Superman’s interest is very simple, actually. Clark Kent seems to be an exceedingly non-threatening figure, someone who only feeds Superman questions that are easy to answer and don’t implicate him in any way with politics or anything else that could drive the public to dislike him. The few times he’s met the man before, Lex has found him irritatingly honest and vaguely disarming.
Today, he looks even more feeble than usual, wearing an ill-fitting suit and his characteristic glasses. Nonetheless, Lex beckons him to sit down. He’s been staring at the same document for two hours, as the cleanup crew removed all shards of glass from the ground, but Kent doesn’t need to know that. He makes a show of putting the papers away to address his interlocutor.
“Mr. Kent,” he greets. “Am I misremembering the fact you’re not here to interview me?”
The other man gives him a sheepish smile. “No, Mr. Luthor, you’re not misremembering. I’m here on behalf of the Daily Planet. As you may know, we’re undergoing a period of financial difficulty, and it seems like bankruptcy is imminent.”
Lex does know about that. It’s one of the few things he learned, watching television in the communal room during the last months of his imprisonment. At the same time, the implications of Kent’s statement are staggering. Does he really expect Lex Luthor to…
“Let me get this straight,” he commences. “You want me to bail out the Daily Planet? The very newspaper whose reckless reporting led to my imprisonment?”
Clark looks alarmed by Lex’s sudden outburst. To be fair, Lex doesn’t really know where that came from. He was the picture of composure just a few minutes ago. “Mr. Luthor, the Daily Planet is one of the most important newspapers in the history of-”
“The Daily Planet is a worthless rag.The paper it’s printed on is worth a thousand times the nonsense you have the gall to call journalism. Don’t get me started on the electricity that goes wasted when people use you website.”
“B-but Mr. Luthor, there are dozens of people who rely on the Planet for their employment-”
“And I’m sure they’ll contribute more to society if they start working at Big Belly Burgers. Are you done with your pathetic begging, or are you going to waste more of my time?”
But Kent is clearly not done, because he continues. “Mr. Luthor, you know Superman is a personal acquaintance of mine. And he’s willing to do anything you ask. Anything as long as it’s reasonable. Isn’t there… a favor he could do for you? Something that could change your mind?”
A personal favor from Superman, huh? Apparently while he was in prison, the Daily Planet has completely given up the pretense of unbiased reporting and its journalists have come out about being a collective of Kryptonian lap dogs.
“Superman was just here a while ago, Mr. Kent. You might have noticed there’s a huge fucking hole in one of my windows?”
“Ah, yes,” says Kent, looking around the room. “It is a little chilly in here.”
“So you’ll understand my reluctance to believe the alien would do anything that isn’t directly antagonistic to me, let alone something that could help me.”
“I can vouch for him!” tries Kent. “I promise he’ll do whatever you need. You just need to ask.”
The words are not spoken with the uncertainty of an inexperienced liar trying to hide their deception, or the bravado of an established con-artist. Kent really believes he can make Superman, the flying God who can defeat giant monsters with his bare hands, do anything he wants. Is it just part of the agreement the Kryptonian keeps with the Daily Planet? Could there be… something more between the two men?
“Tell me something, Mr. Kent,” he begins. “Is Superman your boyfriend?”
Kent looks at Lex with a bewildered expression. “What? No, why would you ask that?”
“It’s just that the level of closeness you seem to share is highly unusual for two people who simply have a business relationship.”
“He’s… a friend. Nothing more than that,” says Kent. He doesn’t seem disappointed, but there is a hint of deception in his face.
“So Superman is straight, assuming we can box the Kryptonian in the categories of sexuality that human beings use,” says Lex. He can’t say he has spent a lot of time contemplating the alien's erotic desires, barring his public accusations of Superman having a harem.
“No. H-he, uhm… What?” stammers Kent. “I don’t know, Mr. Luthor. I told you, I’m not involved in that side of Superman’s life. Even if he wasn’t straight, I’m sure he wouldn’t like the entirety of the world speculating about that part of his identity.
“Right,” says Lex derisively. “People wouldn’t like their Superman to have those kinds of desires, would they?”
“Maybe not,” admits the reporter.
It occurs to Lex that he has an idea. It’s not a big idea, like those bright lightbulbs that used to go off inside of his brain all the time, but it’s something. A little flickering candle, maybe, asking to be attended to.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll bail out the Daily Planet.”
“You will?” asks Kent, clearly taken aback by his sudden change of mind.
“Tell Superman to meet me at Axiom L, tonight at eight.”
“Wait,” says Kent. “Shouldn’t you tell me first what exactly you want from him?”
“I don’t think I will. Make sure he shows up, and your horrible newspaper won’t have to close.”